“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in 1953, adding “She writes in English quite beautifully.” Waugh had spent several days as a guest of the Bisches in their elegant apartments opposite the Parc Royal in Brussels. Jacques Bisch was then a director of the Belgian office Société Générale, one of the leading French banks. Waugh confided that he had mistaken Jacques Bisch for a Belgian for most of the visit and had “dropped brick after brick” in his typically less-than-circumspect comments about the French.
Waugh’s suspicions about Mme. Bisch, however, were right on the mark. He probably had no idea, though, why she had chosen to write novels in English. It was a decision that came about, more than anything, through the disruptive effects of history.
Born on her family’s estate outside Vienna in 1901, Edith Ausch Kemengi was raised in the privilege of the most prominent members of the Austo-Hungarian court. Like the narrator of her semi-autobiographical novel Felding Castle, hers was “a world so different from that of my grandchildren that it might have been several hundred years ago.” Her father came from noble families in Hungary (Kemengi, more often spelled Kemenyi) and Austria (Ausch) and was a counselor and lawyer to the royal household of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sixty years after the fact, she remembered watching her father marching in one of the annual court parades from the window of their house in Vienna. Her mother was Jewish, but from a family of sufficient wealth and distance from the Orthodox faith to be considered acceptable in court society.
After the end of World War One and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, however, Count Kemengi found himself land rich and cash poor and put most of his estate up for auction. Société Générale, like other French banks, saw the opportunity to swoop up some choice real estate for almost nothing and sent a young agent, Jacques Bisch, to bid on them. He took away with him not only the title to thousands of acres of Austrian land but also the Count’s daughter. By then, Edith had begun working as a writer, publishing theater reviews and short stories in Vienna and Berlin under the name of Edith Ausch.
She put her writing career on hold for the next twenty years, however, concentrating on assimilating into Parisian society and performing the role of wife and hostess in support of her husband’s career. Jacques Bisch rose quickly in the bank. The couple spent the early 1930s in London, where they were leading members of the colony of French expats. When King George V attended the memorial service for French president Raymond Poincaré at Westminster Cathedal in 1934, the Bisches were in attendance.
Their comfortable life in Paris was discrupted when the Germans invaded in 1940. Despite Edith’s Jewish ancestry, however, they remained. Edith put her language skills in service of the Resistance, having become fluent in French and English in addition to German. She translated communiques to and from the Special Operations Executive, an experience she later said gave her confidence in handling the nuances of English prose.
Her first novel, Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, was published in 1950 and demonstrated her ease in navigating the ways of European society. Most of the book consists of a conversation between Irina, the Russian-born widow of Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Marie has invited Irina to her villa above Lake Geneva out of courtesy, but really to probe Irina’s intent regarding what she considers an estate belonging to Gaëtan’s family as a whole. Soon, however, the topic shifts from property to love. Marie, it turns out, was in love with her cousin and crushed by his decision to marry a Frenchwoman (Irina is his second wife).
I thought Gaëtan quite a fine short novel when I wrote about it back in 2019, but it received only mildly positive reviews. Her next novel, The Bidou Inheritance (1951), her first published in the U.S. as well as England, made a bigger splash. The story of a small town French shopkeeper and the intrigues regarding his estate won glowing praise from Harper’s chief reviewer, Katherine Gauss:
Miss de Born, an Austrian married to a Frenchman, writes in almost flawless English with quiet distinction, and there is a classic sense of tragedy in the way in which she shows, through two generations, how the child against its own will apes what it most hates in the parent. She is a most perceptive and able new novelist
The Saturday Review put the book to a severe test by assigning it to Henri Peyre, then professor of French at Yale. Peyre noted that the subject of family members keeping a protective eye on a potential inheritance had been “a favorite of French fiction since the Revolution.” His assessment of de Born’s strengths and weakenesses may be the most succinct and accurate from all the reviews her subsequent sixteen novels received:
If she cannot be called a great writer, or at least not yet, she is undoubtedly a skilful one who, with great simplicity and artistic restraint, without any of the “modern” features of philosophy, any delving into the subconscious, morbid eroticism, fiashy juggling with time and logic, has composed a wellmade, a convincing, and an honest work of fiction.
While wellmade, convincing, and honest are admirable qualities, they tend not to be those that assure a writer’s place in literary history.
De Born’s skill in writing fiction in English was often, at least in the first decade of her career, considered the most notable feature of her work. The novelist Francis King, who became a close friend of de Born, recalled his own reaction to the book:
When the author presented me with a copy of the book (The Bidou Inheritance) some twenty years ago, my first astonished thought after devouring a single page was “How beautifully this woman writes!” Why astonished? The answer to that is that Born was an Austrian, who married a Frenchman (Jacques Bisch) and lived much of her life in Belgium, but like Conrad, Nabokov and Julian Green, she miraculously wrote better in her adopted language than most people in the language to which they were born. My second, much later thought was that she dealt with the cupidity of the French bourgeoisie with all the vividness of a Francois Mauriac or a Julian Green….
King later learned that Edith relied on help from a friend in England, the wife of a Norfolk vicar, to clean up and copy-edit her prose, so that unlike Conrad and Nabokov, her English was not a solo production. However, she shared with them what King called a sense of “foreignness”:
… though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreignness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.
Still, de Born’s prose was good enough to impress Waugh, whose own is considered some of the best of his time. Waugh reviewed her third novel, Daughter of the House (1953) — before staying as her guest — and found it her most mature novel so far:
Madame de Born has already attracted the admiration of the fastidious by her two previous works; brief, severly elegant, classical contes. In Daughter of the House she has spread her wings full span. It is a haunting, highly original story; an authentic work of art, classical in form and . Without once transgressing her self-imposed limits, the author produces an effect of breadth and intensity quite unusual in a modern novel, and worthy of comparison with the masters of her craft. It is a complete book, from which nothing could be taken and to which nothing could be added, without loss.
Over the next twenty-five years, Edith de Born published at a steady rate. Seven novels in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, and four more in the 1970s. Two of her novels — Felding Castle (1959) and The House in Vienna (1959) — came closest to her own experience. In the first, a young girl named Milli has her first romances in the days just before the outbreak of World War One. The second takes Milli forward a decade, to a Vienna where noble families are now scraping by. Those who have some property left are selling it off, like de Born’s father did. Those still young enough to hope are leaving for Berlin or Paris or America. And many, desperate and bankrupt, are forced, like Fraulein Hertha von Branner, to write begging letters in hopes of finding work:
I have heard that you seek a gouvernesse for your children and so allow myself herewith to offer you my services. I write you in Englisch because it is a langwitsch which I have always spoken and written with great plaisure. My dear Father was two years at Eton, the famous Englisch school…. I mention him only as a guaranty for my standing, he was a Sektionschef in our Ministry for the Inside. Naturally I am ready to furnish you with every otherwise desired reference.
Although Felding Castle and The House in Vienna were advertised as the first two books of a trilogy, the next book she published, The Flat in Paris has no connection with their stories. Indeed, The Flat in Paris is one of her stodgiest books, perhaps because she forgot that she wrote at her best when the themes of love and property were intertwined. When she wrote of love alone, the result reads somewhat like the experience of driving a car with underinflated tires. One can reach the destination all the same, but it’s a tedious and inefficient journey.
Francis King once observed that like Edith Wharton, de Born “belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility,” adding that,
Edith de Born’s books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people — tended by devoted by dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d’art in the taste of a bygone age — is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction.
And the kind of adjectives reviewers used to describe de Born’s work lead one to think that she belongs in the school of followers/imitators of Henry James: “mature, authoritative, and genuinely sensitive”; “sensitive and delightful”; “lightly and subtly done”; “curiously tantalizing”; “elegant fable.” Peter Ackroyd wrote that one of her later novels, Mutual Observation, was “written with great intelligence and charm,” then closed, cuttingly, “and one can recommend it to one’s grandmother.” Anita Brookner, who often mentioned de Born as a writer she admired, also watered down her praise with such remarks as “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived” and that de Born “writes like a lady.”
But though de Born certainly knew exactly which fork to use in any dinner service, as well as which wine to serve with any dish, she was willing to delve into subjects that would not have been considered proper for conversations at her table. The Penalty of Exile (1964) is about a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — is found murdered in her dingy flat near Brussels’ Gare du Midi. State of Possession (note the reference to property and ownership in the title) is about a woman attempting to prove herself the mother of her illegitimate child.
In The Imperfect Marriage, Roger Warnier, heir of a wealthy family in the industrial north of France, returns from years as a prisoner of war in Germany and informs his wife that he is now in a relationship with one of his fellow prisoners and intends to remain so. Already unhappy with the grey life in their factory town, after growing up in the vineyards of the sunny south, she considers leaving but decides in the end to live in a form of coexistence that maintains a fine veneer of propriety — as well as her status in society. It was not surprising, Christopher Wordsworth once observed, that William Trevor sang praises for de Born’s work, “since both are considerable specialists on what survives and seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
De Born did return to her unfinished autobiographical trilogy, if indirectly, in her 1968 novel Scars. Although the lead character is now Mitzi, not Milli, the two women share similar histories. Mitzi is now an older woman, living in London, cut off by the First World War from the Austria she knew as a child, cut off from many of her Jewish relatives by the Second. As was de Born herself in Brussels, Mitzi’s may be a comfortable exile, but it is an exile nonetheless, an exile in both time and space.
In the book, a visit by an old Viennese friend forces Mitzi to reflect on the life she had left behind when she fled Austria following the Anschluss. But she also finds that she and Egon, the friend, share more than a past. They share the experience of being refugees:
They had crossed psychological as well as geographical frontiers and experienced the fact that national achievements could not be carried from one land to another. Famous men in German-speaking countries were asked elsewhere to spell their names; others, normally in a position to grant favors, were reduced to begging for the smallest privilege. People who had refused all forms of compromise were forced to accept the most uncongenial surroundings and humiliating conditions in order to subsist.
De Born understands, however, that losing one thing in life often means gaining something else. Having survived the tragedy of disrupted lives,
… they had become aware of new realities. Obliged to revise their standards of thought and value, both of them had developed from exiles into explorers of new moral fields. They had become pioneers of a world in which the nation was an anachronism. Gradually the frontiers they had crossed were replaced by unforeseen invisible boundaries, which could reveal wide chasms between people who still persisted in thinking in terms of the past and others who belonged to the future.
Although Edith de Born wrote and spoke English fluently, hosted the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and became a close friend of the historian Alethea Hayter, she never lost her sense of foreignness in the eyes of the English literary establishment. A critic as esteemed as V. S. Pritchett might say that her novel The Engagement was “An uncommonly good novel,” but the general assessment was that she was, at best, a minor novelist of manners. Someone to read between doing the shopping and mending socks, as a character in Jane Gillespie’s Envy does, and not, as in Anita Brookner’s dismissive judgment, someone whose novels need to be revived.
Indeed, it’s ironic to see Brookner making this judgment, given the significant role that the experience of exile plays in several of her novels. It’s hard to think that Brookner failed to see that it was precisely this experience, which was purely second-hand to her, that gave Edith de Born the power to see what “seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”
Edith de Born published her last novel, The Negligent Daughter in 1978. She and her husband moved from rue Royale to a grand townhouse in the rue Marteau decorated with priceless paintings by Picasso, Miro, and Paul Delvaux and run by superior Flemish housekeeper. She died in 1987.