Colette, as British author Angela Carter pointed out in a wittily perceptive article in 1980, is perhaps the only 20th-century woman writer to be commonly referred to by her surname only.
Of course that surname is her father’s – “you can’t subvert patriarchy that easily”, added Carter – but by a happy accident, it “doubles as a girlish handle”.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette first published as Colette Willy, pragmatically adopting the pen-name of her unscrupulous but well-connected first husband. During her second marriage to a famous newspaper editor and politician, she became the aristocratic Colette de Jouvenel. Once divorced for the second time, however, she gave up the patriarchal practice of taking her husband’s name and became simply Colette.
