Steeped in France: Guest Post by Miriam Drori

I’m very pleased to welcome my author friend Miriam Drori to the blog today. I have known Miriam for about eight years, but I only had the pleasure of meeting her in person a few years ago in Carcassonne, when our former publisher invited us to an author get-together.

Miriam is about to publish Style and the Solitary, the first in a series of crime mysteries set in Jerusalem. So what does that have to do with France? Well, one of the main characters is an immigrant from France and therefore something of an outsider. And the story of Beauty and the Beast, which was published by a French author in 1740, has a significant bearing on Miriam’s story. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve was a penniless widow in a man’s world and thus also…