Marguerite-Yerta Méléra

Born on December 6, 1880, in the United States and later associated with the Bernese Jura in Switzerland, Marguerite-Yerta Méléra was a French-language writer, biographer, and literary critic. Library records from the Bibliothèque nationale de France describe her as a novelist, biographer, critic, and author of books for younger readers, and they list a body of work that continued across several decades until her death in Paris in December 1965.

She is especially remembered for books connected to Arthur Rimbaud, including Les Voyages d'Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Au sujet de Rimbaud, and Résonances autour de Rimbaud. BnF records also show her work as a translator, including translations of books by James Hilton, which gives a sense of how broad her literary interests were.

Some sources also note that she wrote for Je suis partout and that she was the first woman elected to the Institut jurassien des sciences, des lettres et des arts. Because details of her early life and even her birthplace are reported a little differently across sources, it is safest to say that she was an international figure by background, Swiss by association, and active in the French literary world for much of the 20th century.