Élyane Dezon-Jones
Estelle Monbrun is the nom de plume of a university professor, Élyane Dezon-Jones, who taught at Barnard college and Washington University. She served as the editor-in-chief of Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust for seven years, and has published critical editions of Proust's Le Côté de Guermantes (Flammarion, 1987) and Du côté de chez Swann (Hachette Livre de poche classique, 1992). She is also the author of Marie de Gournay: Fragments d'un discours féminin (Jose Corti, 1988) and one of the editors of Marguerite Yourcenar's Correspondence for Éditions Gallimard.
In 1994, Editions Viviane Hamy published her Meurtre chez Tante Léonie, which has been translated in ten languages; the English title is Murder chez Proust. A parody of the mystery genre, Murder chez Proust enjoyed a succès de scandale, as was reported in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and numerous European newspapers. In Le Monde, René de Ceccatty praised the book as a clever mix of works by Agatha Christie and David Lodge. As sequels to Murder chez Proust, Estelle Monbrun published Meurtre à Petite Plaisance, (Chez Marguerite Yourcenar in Northeast Harbor, Maine), Meurtre chez Colette (in collaboration with Anaïs Coste) and Meurtre à Isla negra (Chez Pablo Neruda in Chile). She has just published a new novel Meurtre à Montaigne (2018).