Draft:Marie Elisabeth Roche

The artist and author Marie Elisabeth Roche, known as Lise Roche, was born in Marseilles in 1939, the only daughter of Jean Roche (1901-1992) who, together with his wife Andrée Conradi Roche (c1903-1936), was nominated for the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and again in 1962, 1965 and 1966 for his work on the thyroid gland. He was was rector of the Sorbonne between 1961 and 1969.

Between 1958 and 1962 Lise Roche studied at Ruskin College, Oxford. As an artist she was noted for her abstract prints. While an undergraduate she was employed by the analytical philosopher P. F. Strawson as an au pair and nanny to his son Galen Strawson.

She married the future author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg in Wadham College chapel in 1961 and their daughter Marie-Elsa Bragg, a poet, novelist, therapist and priest, was born in 1965.

Her two novels, written in English, were A Summer's Reckoning (1968) and The Fool's Heart (1969), both published by Rupert Hart-Davis.

A Summer's Reckoning is set in Brittany, in 'a hot sunny narrow-minded, gossip-ridden, long-memoried, calculating fishing port' where a young women named Hélène, is spending the summer with her aunt. She is beset by memories of a failed affair in London with an Englishman named Chris. It was praised as 'a first novel of remarkable perception and subtlety.'

The Fool's Heart is set in during the Occupation in 1944, at a critical moment for the French Resistance movement. The main characters are two brothers, Aimé and Clément Palmet, the former a violent man, the latter a gentle innocent. As a study of mental anguish and collapse, and eventual recovery, it marked a departure.

Lise Roche died by suicide in 1971. Marie-Elsa reflected on her mother's life and death in a 2019 memoir, Sleeping Letters.