Édith Thomas was born in Montrouge in the Parisian region on 23 February 1909. She was a novelist and essayist. In 1933, she was awarded the Prix du Premier Roman for The Death of Marie.

As a journalist for Ce Soir and for the magazines Vendredi, Europe and Regards, she reported on the Spanish Civil War, events in Austria and various other social issues. She joined the Communist Party in 1942 and left abruptly in 1949 after the Tito affair. From 1948 until her death on 7 December 1970, she was the curator of the National Archives.

From 1942, she contributed to the clandestine magazine Les Lettres Françaises and to Editions de Minuit with her Contes d’Auxois.

Her diaries and memoires, key accounts of the intellectual Resistance movement and the immediate post-war years, remained unpublished at that time.

Her novel, The Game of Chess, will be released on 12 April 2018. Published for the first time in 1970 by Grasset, nine months before the sudden death of its author, the similarities with Commentaire by Marcelle Sauvageot, published in 1930 by Stock and again in 2004 by Phébus under the title of the famously successful Laissez-moi, are striking. These two women, remarkably ahead of their time, paid a high price for their insight, as well as their fragility, which was masked by a proud and brilliant intelligence.