Cheri

I devoured Chéri at a gulp. What a wonderful subject and with what intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh

Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental... Very beautiful and subtle... I feel more alive when I read her

One of the country&rsquo;s most significant writers on sexual freedom &hellip; Since her death women&rsquo;s personal narratives about sex have become a hallmark of French literature

A mistress of metaphor and sparking detail, with more punch than Proust

Colette (Author) 
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France, and would later recall her bucolic home and eccentric family in the semi-fictionalized Claudine&rsquo;s House. At the age of twenty, she married the publisher and author &lsquo;Willy&rsquo;, who encouraged her to write her first four novels. The novels made her famous, but her husband, under whose name they had been published, retained her earnings. Escaping her marriage, Colette became a performer in France&rsquo;s music halls, an era of her life she would later describe in The Vagabond. She wrote her most famous works during the 1920s and 30s; these included Chéri, depicting a relationship between an older woman and young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954. 
 
Belinda Jack (Translator) 
Belinda Jack is the author of an acclaimed biography of George Sand and Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.

Chéri: spoiled, petulant, beautiful, aged twenty-five. Léa: magnificent, brilliant, remorseless, aged forty-nine. They are in love, but their relationship exists beyond the bounds of social acceptability and must one day come to an end, no matter the cost. 
 
A succès de scandale on publication for its depiction of transgressive love, Colette&rsquo;s celebrated novella is also a profound and compelling exploration of the passage of time, the body and ageing, mirrors, self-perception, self-knowledge and the tragedy of mortality.

Gigi

Everything that Colette touched became human

This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her  . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris

By turns revolutionary and retrograde, liberated and conservative, a traditionalist who defied labels and loved a title, Colette was nothing if not contradictory. Both her life and her body of work were epic

Colette was in herself a French experiment in life. Her writing was born of her insatiable curiosity for life and love

The most beloved French writer of all time

Colette (Author) 
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France, and would later recall her bucolic home and eccentric family in the semi-fictionalized Claudine’s House. At the age of twenty, she married the publisher and author ‘Willy’, who encouraged her to write her first four novels. The novels made her famous, but her husband, under whose name they had been published, retained her earnings. Escaping her marriage, Colette became a performer in France’s music halls, an era of her life she would later describe in The Vagabond. She wrote her most famous works during the 1920s and 30s; these included Chéri, depicting a relationship between an older woman and young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954. 
 
Belinda Jack (Translator) 
Belinda Jack is the author of an acclaimed biography of George Sand and Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.

‘Fine teeth, my girl. With teeth like that I’d have gobbled up Paris and the rest of the world.' 
 
Gigi, a teenage girl in fin-de-siècle Paris, is being groomed by her family to become a high-class courtesan, just like her aunt and grandmother before her. But despite their best efforts, their timid protégée may have other ideas for her future... 
 
Colette's famous novella is a sly and delicate depiction of exploitation and resistance, and is paired here with the wonderful short story ‘The Cat’.

The Vagabond

A mistress of metaphor and sparking detail, and with more punch than Proust ... Throughout this extraordinary &ndash; irreplaceable! &ndash; novel, Colette provides many exquisitely timed funny-sad turns ...  And no one writes about relationships as perceptively as Colette

An enchanting, sincere and beautifully constructed novel

The most subtle of feminist novels ... It tells the story of a soul&rsquo;s quest for liberation and it asks all of the questions about marriage, love, jealousy, bisexuality, maleness and femaleness which our generation sometimes flatters itself it invented

She explored her field without exhausting it or repeating herself, varying her approach as she grew older and more experienced&hellip;Intense and sensuous, her fiction is full of life and laughter, as she proceeded to tell the story of a woman&rsquo;s life, from childhood into age

Renée, aged 33 and divorced from her serially unfaithful husband, reinvents herself as a dancer in France&rsquo;s music halls. When a wealthy suitor appears promising marriage and stability, Renée must choose between the security he represents and her hard-won life as an artist. 
 
Colette&rsquo;s great novel of the stage was based on her experiences as a struggling music hall performer following her own divorce. By turns melancholy and funny, it is a pioneering work of autofiction and a vivid portrayal of one woman&rsquo;s quest for freedom.

Colette

Belinda Jack

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind&hellip; [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time

France&rsquo;s foremost woman of letters &hellip;[although] she did not invent the Modern French Woman in fiction, [she supplied] the organs, the accuracies, the mind and the heart

&lsquo;I was an independent, stray dog who answered to no one&hellip;&rsquo; 
 
Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond her house is the village, where travelling performers stop for the night and wedding feasts take place under a bright summer moon. Inside her house are Mama, who loves animals, and Papa, who lost his leg in the war, and a library full of forbidden and irresistible books... 
 
Based on Colette&rsquo;s own early life, Claudine&rsquo;s House is a rich and enchanting depiction of childhood, animals, flowers, trees, books, families and love in late-nineteenth-century France.

Colette

Praise for Claudine's House

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time

Books by Colette

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