The novelist, translator and essayist Diane de Margerie died Friday at the age of 95, her family announced to AFP. The author of La Femme en pierre died at Cochin Hospital in Paris. She was known as a member for some 35 years, until 2014, of the Femina Prize jury.
Born on Christmas Eve 1927 to a diplomat father, she lived a cosmopolitan youth and entered literature through translation, that of the American Edith Wharton. A literary critic, she became an author late in life, at the age of 46, with the novel The Revealing Detail. She has published essays on several writers, including four on Marcel Proust and one on George Sand, and autobiographical surveys.
She had three children from two different fathers, the Italian Riccardo Pignatelli della Leonessa then the writer Dominique Fernandez, later elected to the French Academy.
