The letters behind Breton's Nadja resurface in a new edition
A century after André Breton met the woman he turned into the heroine of his 1928 book, the letters she wrote him are being published anew, prompting a reassessment of how she was treated.
A new edition gathers the letters that Nadja addressed to André Breton, according to En attendant Nadeau. The correspondence dates from around the time of their encounter roughly a century ago, the meeting that Breton later transformed into his 1928 book Nadja.
En attendant Nadeau frames the publication as more than a literary event. The outlet argues that reading Nadja's own words invites readers to reconsider the fate reserved for women in social and psychic distress — a question the original book, told entirely through Breton's perspective, left largely unexamined.
The woman Breton called Nadja was Léona Delcourt, though the source material for this article does not give further biographical or editorial detail — no publisher, editor or date of release is specified in the summary available. What is clear is that the new edition shifts the vantage point: where Breton's Nadja made her a figure of Surrealist fascination, her letters are said to return her to the position of a writing subject rather than an observed one.
For readers who have long kept Breton's Nadja on their shelves, the appearance of her own letters offers a chance to read the story from the other side of the exchange.
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