In a French courtroom in 1935, the trial of Gladys Eysenach is taking place - an old woman, still beautiful, elegant, and accused of shooting dead her much-younger lover. Némirovsky with her usual depth of insight and pitiless compassion, shows us the soul of a desperate woman obsessed with her lost youth. Throughout the week we dramatise key events in Gladys's life to discover the truth of why Gladys shot dead the young man.

Gladys ........ Frances Barber
Némirovsky ...... Anna Francolini
Flora ...... Natasha Cowley
Presiding Judge ...... David Sterne

Jezebel written by Irène Némirovsky
Translated by Sandra Smith
Dramatised by Ellen Dryden

Produced and Directed by Pauline Harris

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.

Irène Némirovsky ( 24 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin born in Kiev Ukraine under the Russian Empire; she lived more than half her life in France and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested by the Nazis as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Successful in her day, she is now best known for the posthumously-published Suite française. Némirovsky's older daughter, Denise, kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking it was a diary, which would be too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and so read the notebook first. Upon discovering what it contained, it was published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004. It has since been translated into 38 languages and as of 2008 has sold 2.5 million copies. Show less