Henry Gréville

aHenry Gréville was the pen name of Alice Fleury, born in Paris in 1842. Her father, a professor, taught her himself, in Latin, Greek, mathematics and modern languages, before taking a post in Saint Petersburg. She followed him there at fifteen and stayed fifteen years, giving lessons in aristocratic Russian households and marrying a French professor of law living in the city.

Back in France from 1872, she published Dosia in 1876. The novel was crowned by the Académie française and sold remarkably well: readers were discovering Russian society described by someone who had lived in it, rather than by a passing traveller.

She signed some fifty volumes, first on Russia, later on ordinary French life, and was translated into most European languages. She died in 1902. Why she chose a man's name is not recorded.