Last month marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who assumed the mononym Colette after her second divorce. Married at 20, she was coerced by her first husband to write books under his name, as depicted in the 2018 biopic starring Keira Knightley and Dominic West. The Claudine series proved a sensation, rapturously relaying a young girl’s coming-of-age and her search for sexual freedom; the modern French teenager had arrived. Once separated, Colette immersed herself in “pleasures so lightly called physical”, and expressed them in her novellas with poetic intensity and a joyous savoir faire. Simone de Beauvoir called her “the only great woman writer in France”, but Colette also flourished as a dancer, screenwriter, librettist, journalist and the hands-on owner of a beauty chain. She loved women, married men three times, and, aged 40, gave birth to a daughter. She was awarded four ranks of the Légion d’honneur, became the first female president of the Académie Goncourt, and was the first woman to receive a state funeral in France upon her death in 1954. For those new to this astonishing author’s work, writer and Colette fan James Hopkin suggests some good places to start.
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The entry point
If you don’t fancy the gorgeously frenetic prose of the Claudine series (translated by Antonia White), then you should start with The Vagabond (1910) translated by Enid McLeod. It’s here that Colette finds her voice in the measured sensuality, melancholy and humour of a woman determined to move on. Thirty-three-year-old Renée Néré (Renée means “reborn”) is treading the boards after escaping an oppressive marriage. When Renée succumbs to the “voluptuous pleasure” of an admirer, she flees on tour. Colette was writing her own life. She composed the book while a performing artiste on a 32-city tour of France, her makeup case across her knees as a desk. Each page is marked by tender insight and painterly detail as Colette urges us to feel the beauty and bravery of the wandering life, and to challenge the conventions of love. Angela Carter declared the novel “one of the most truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a male-dominated society”.
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The one to read in the garden
Loathing the fuss around death, Colette did not attend the funeral of the mother she adored. But 10 years later, she published La Maison de Claudine (1922), translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid McLeod, and issued as My Mother’s House. In this memoir of her idyllic childhood in Burgundy, the author resurrected an Earth goddess. Sido roamed her gardens at dawn, trailing a scent of lemon verbena leaves as she tended her “roses, lychnis, hydrangeas”. Dispensing maternal instruction alongside shrewd country wisdom and wordplay, she was generous to her children and to all living creatures. Colette wants us to adore her, and we do. The gently rhapsodic prose is an elegy, sung not just to her mother but to the vanished pastoral of the late 19th century. Flower-lovers take note: Colette writes ravishingly about plants and their soul-repairing powers, from pink juneberries to the Cuisse-de-Nymphe émue rose.
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If you want to explore sexual freedom
Colette enjoyed many relationships with women, the longest with Mathilde de Morny, known as “Max” or “Missy”. The couple caused an uproar with an onstage kiss in 1907. Ever the provocateur, Colette regularly performed in near-naked revues such as Flesh. Detractors, and there were many, called her “Culotte” (meaning “knickers”). As a woman living and writing her passions at the beginning of the 20th century, a time of rampant misogyny, Colette was radical, self-disciplined and courageous. She wasn’t trying to write like a man; she had created a new style. She was also a prolific journalist. Look at Earthly Paradise for examples. Or try The Pure and the Impure (1932/41; translated by Herma Briffault) and follow an older Colette as she visits lesbian clubs and opium dens. Calling herself a “mental hermaphrodite”, she nevertheless makes it clear where her sympathies lie: “We can never bring enough twilight, silence and gravity to surround the embrace of two women.”
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If you’re short of time
Gigi (1944) made the writer’s name in English (translated by Roger Senhouse), and launched the career of a young actor whom Colette chose for the stage adaptation after spotting her in a Monte Carlo hotel. Her name? Audrey Hepburn. Colette had an uncanny ability to read a face, a landscape, a longing. She uses this gift to great effect as the narrator-investigator of her short stories, probing beneath the masquerade of the Belle Époque to reveal truths laced with poison as well as pleasure. You’ll love the ‘‘shipwrecked’’ souls from demimonde to beau monde alike with their fruity gossip and daily despair. And you won’t escape the narrator’s beady eye or insolent wit. Yet her tone is often soothing. In The Sémiramis Bar, frequented by “hard-ups in weird jackets”, she feels at home with the tough-talking female owner. In the controlled menace of The Rainy Moon, a betrayed wife seeks revenge through witchcraft. And in Bella-Vista, two women running a guesthouse try to conceal their relationship. Read the novella The Cat. No one writes about animals quite like Madame Colette.
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The masterpiece
Chéri (1920, new translation by Paul Eprile) is a fable set in 1912 about a voluptuous courtesan, Léa, and her handsome “almost filial” fop, Fred/Chéri, 25 years her junior (Colette herself later seduced her 16-year-old stepson during her second marriage). Léa feeds her “nursling” culinary and bodily pleasures, which would make you gag if you weren’t already intoxicated by Colette’s sensual survey of the spoilt pair. She never shirked from writing her body, often mercilessly. The End of Chéri (1926) is a brilliantly bleak follow-up, lamenting the end of innocence after the first world war, while celebrating an older woman who regains her authority. Colette wrote repeatedly of the need to rejuvenate yourself, especially after “one of the great banalities of existence, love”.
“Look around you,” she said in an interview, “soak up the atmosphere of things, that’s the purpose of life.” And you should soak up Colette. With her guidance you’ll soon be strong enough to welcome again “from every source the fleeting benediction of joy”.
• This article was amended on 24 February 2023. An earlier version misspelt Paul Eprile’s name.
