Delly

Delly is the joint pen name of a brother and sister, Jeanne-Marie Petitjean de La Rosière (born in Avignon on September 13, 1875) and Frédéric Petitjean de La Rosière (born in Vannes on September 6, 1876), authors of popular romance novels.

Delly's novels, little known to readers in the 21st century, were extremely popular between 1910 and 1950, and were among the biggest publishing successes in France and abroad.

Biography

Jeanne-Marie and Frédéric were the children of a soldier, Ernest Petitjean, and his wife, Charlotte Gaultier de La Rosière, whose name they took. They spent their childhood in Vannes before moving to Versailles after their father retired. There they became friends with their neighbor, the family of Commandant Brunot, whose wife Marie would become, a few years later, the children's book author Marie d'Agon de la Contrie.

Marie, a young dreamer who devoted her entire life to writing, was the source of a superabundant body of work that began publication in 1903 with Dans les ruines. Frédéric's contribution is less notable in writing than in the skilful management of publishing contracts, with several publishing houses sharing this author who was systematically successful. The rhythm of publication, several novels a year until 1925, and the very good sales figures ensured the siblings a comfortable income. They did not prevent the two authors from living in perfect discretion, until they remained unknown to the general public and the critics.

Delly's identity was not revealed until Jeanne-Marie's death on April 1, 1947, two years before her brother's. They are buried in the Cemetery of Notre-Dame.

Marie and Frédéric Petitjean bequeathed part of their fortune and all their manuscripts to the Société des gens de lettres to help sick or needy writers (Delly grant). A room in the Hôtel de Massa, headquarters of the SGDL, is called the Delly Room.

Writings

Delly has been considered the archetypal author of popular novels or even airport novels, in this case sentimental. The style has been criticized as flat and repetitive, with plots built on an unchanging, Manichean pattern: the opposition between a protagonist symbolizing purity and other characters seeking to thwart her quest for perfect love. The whole work is marked by a social structure and morality that remain those of the beginning of the century, refusing the upheavals of the time in which Delly lives. The authors are also one of the targets of Louis-Ferdinand Céline in his Conversations with Professor Y.

Delly's novels, little known to today's readers and neglected by critics, were extremely popular between 1910 and 1980, and were among the most successful of the world's publishing houses at that time. They were republished until the 1980s.

In 2011, the publication of a dossier in the magazine Le Rocambole has helped to reassess the duo, and to highlight the evolution of Delly's career: until the war, we can speak of the "first Delly", which corresponds to half of the works written and published, short novels, more sentimental and feeling a very Catholic inspiration, sometimes militant. From the Great War, the inspiration changes: Le Mystère de Ker-Even (1916) is the first of a series of "great novels" of popular adventures, generally twice as long and published in two volumes by successive publishers, Flammarion or Tallandier. The sentimental element is diluted in the adventure, often located in an exotic setting (Central or South America, India, the Orient).

This very clear transformation can be attributed to a stronger involvement of Frédéric Petitjean in the writing or development of the plots. For example, Le Maître du silence (1917, in two volumes, Sous le masque and Le Secret du Kou-Kou-Noor) is a wild science fiction novel whose hero is a real superman with telepathic powers. Other later novels adopt a detective story structure, which is very unexpected for such an author, but ultimately the result of a logical evolution, crime and evil being at the center of all Dellyan work. Some of the last novels written during the 1930s (and published posthumously) show a rather clear social evolution compared to the early novels.

Finally, if most of the novels conclude on a happy ending, despite the accumulation of crimes and hardships, this is not the case of Malereyne (posthumous, 1952), a novel of absolute darkness, where all the characters are negative, and which ends without any possible remission, which is a huge surprise and contrasts with the rest of the work.

The great singularity of Delly's work is that one third of it is composed of "posthumous" novels: from 1925 onwards, the Delly couple decided to reduce the publication of unpublished works in bookstores, while maintaining a sustained rhythm of writing. In return, they supplied publishers with pre-war books published only in serial form, which gave the illusion of continuous production and generated a clear gap between the time of first publication (pre-publication in the press before 1914) and the date of publication in bookstores, sometimes twenty years later, or even up to forty years later for certain titles.

During this time, the siblings were writing new works (often long, flamboyant popular novels) for their posterity. As a result, the perception of the readership that praised Delly's novels in the 1950s and 1960s (as well as that of the critics who dismissed them as literature) was distorted by this gap between writing and publication, a situation accentuated by the author's relative anonymity. In order to evaluate Delly's work correctly, it was first necessary to reclassify it in the chronological order of its writing and first publication in serial form, and then to inventory its different editions in volume, which was attempted for the first time in the dossier published by Le Rocambole.

References

• Baticle, Yveline (1984). "Delly: Autopsie du Roman Rose," Communication et langages, Vol. LXI, No. 1, pp. 77–86.
• Bettinotti, Julia (1995). Guimauve et Fleur d'Oranger. Québec: Nuit Blanche.
• Paulvé, Dominique & Marie Guérin (1994). Le Roman du Roman Rose. Paris: J.-C. Lattès.

External links

• Works by Delly at Gallica