SOURCE: "'Getting Away with Murd(h)er': Author's Preface and Narrator's Text, Reading Marguerite Yourcenar's Coup de Grâce 'After Auschwitz,'" in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 210-20.

Marks is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on French literature, focusing mainly on the works of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. In the following essay, she analyzes the relationship between the novel Coup de Grâce, written in 1938, and the preface Yourcenar added to it in 1962. Marks argues that the novel harbors anti-Semitic sentiments and that the preface was designed to make the reader believe they do not reflect Yourcenar's actual feelings.

Since the early summer of 1987 the focus of my research has shifted. It began, as one might imagine, with a book, Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture, and the intersection...