Juliette Benzoni (1920–2016)

Juliette Benzoni, née Andrée-Marguerite-Juliette Mangin, was born in Paris to an upper-middle-class family, the daughter of Charles-Hubert Mangin and his wife Marie-Susanne Arnold. She discovered her passion for history at the age of nine, while reading a book about Jeanne d'Arc, and her father encouraged her to read books by Alexander Dumas. She was educated at the Lycée Fénelon, College d'Hulst and the Institut Catholique de Paris, where she studied philosophy, law and literature, until interrupted by World War II.
During this period,
she married Maurice Gallois, a doctor, and they moved to Dijon and had two children. In 1950, her husband died of a heart attack, leaving her a widow at the age of 30 with two young children to support. She went to Morocco to visit her in-laws and found work writing for an advertising agency. She also met a young French officer, André Benzoni from Corsica, and they married in 1952, a few weeks before he was to leave for Indochina. She returned to France and settled in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Mandé, where he would later become deputy mayor. She began working as a journalist, writing for Histoire pour tous and Le Journal du dimanche. She also wrote screenplays and short stories, and then began to produce a series of historical romance novels along the lines of the hugely successful Angélique series by Anne and Serge Golon. Eventually she wrote 86 works between 1962 and her death, including 7 Catherine series novels, 6 Marianne series novels, 18 short story collections, and 3 stand alone novels. The books were so popular that foreign publishers lined up to acquire the rights, and they were translated into 22 languages. Catherine was first adapted for the cinema in 1969, and four more of Benzoni's books later were made into films for television. In 1973, she received the Prix Alexandre Dumas for her work on the Catherine and the Marianne series, and in 1988, the Prix Louis Barthou from the Académie française for her novel Félicia au Soliel Couchant (Felicia at Sunset).