"I regret nothing," Irène Némirovsky wrote, as the ravages of typhus beckoned death at Auschwitz. "I have been happy. I have been loved. I am still loved, I know that's true."

When the end came, on Aug. 19, 1942, she was 39. She left behind a husband, Michel Epstein, and two dearly loved little girls. She also left behind an unfinished novel.

"Suite Française," which was published in the United States in 2006 to immense acclaim, is, essentially, two novellas in one. The first deals with the flight of civilians from Paris as German troops enter the prostrate city in June 1940. The second takes the reader through early July 1941, when soldiers occupying the hamlet of Issy-l'Eveque depart for what was to become Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. On July 13, Némirovsky was arrested by French police as a "stateless person of Jewish descent."

Those dates are a key to understanding Némirovsky's genius. One of the unique aspects of "Suite Française" is that, in addition to its exquisite writing, it was composed as events unfolded. There was no time for leisurely reflection, for plot refinement or polishing. She wrote the book in cramped, microscopic longhand, obviously to save precious paper, and it was discovered only in the late 1990s, when Némirovsky's eldest daughter, Denise, finally summoned the courage to read what she thought was her mother's diary.

Great literature often is a metaphor of the author's own life, and Irène Némirovsky's story bears that out. She was, as Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt tell us in the masterful new biography, "The Life of Irène Némirovsky" (Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $35, translated by Euan Cameron), "a French writer whom fate had caused to be born in Kiev." She was 14 when revolution swept through Russia, and her family managed to escape in 1919 to France, where her wealthy parents had for years vacationed. Yet Irène never forgot the splendor of Kiev, which she remembered as "full of trees, and undulating, like a woman's body, as beautiful as a city can be."

Idyllic as her writing was, there was nothing enchanting about her family life. The Némirovskys were Jews who despised their Jewishness. Irène's father was often away on business; her mother, Anna, was a loathsome creature with an insatiable thirst for social status. She routinely deposited Irène and her nanny, Zezelle, in third-rate hostelries while she booked suites for herself in sumptuous hotels to carry on liaisons. Sensing her daughter's disgust, Anna retaliated by summarily dismissing Zezelle, who committed suicide.

The loss scarred Irène, yet, in the view of her biographers, it also animated her writing. The feelings of abandonment, of hatred for her mother, of her father's profound disinterest -- as well as the horrors witnessed as the Bolsheviks imposed their will on Russia -- are woven through Némirovsky's writing in a constant leitmotif. Even the devotion and love of her husband, a fellow Russian émigré who perished at the Nazis' hands not long after his wife, could not assuage the pain.

This biography is a work of great erudition, equal to its complex subject. If there is one lesson I took from its pages -- and there are many -- it is that what a writer whispers is equally important as what a writer says.

Michael J. Bonafield lives in Apple Valley and is at work on a novel about Robert E. Lee.