Cheri

Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. 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 and help her to be beautiful … One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris … It’s as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving * New York Times *
Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental… Very beautiful and subtle… I feel more alive when I read her – Helen Simpson * Guardian *
Everything that Colette touched became human… She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur * The Times *
Sumptuous * Time *
A perfectionist in her every word * Spectator *
Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France * New York Times *
The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human … Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist—these are the qualities of the artist and the woman. It is time to rediscover them
She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience * Guardian *
A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful
Vintage has republished this classic from Colette that was first published in 1920 and it still sparkles and teases * The Connexion *

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri, and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied, and active life. Born in Burgundy in 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats, and children, she was educated at the local village school.

At the age of twenty, she moved to Paris with her first husband, the notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthiers-Viller (Willy). By locking her in her room, Willy forced Colette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success.

Colette left Willy in 1906 and worked in music-halls as an actor and dancer. She had a love affair with Napoleon’s niece, married twice more, and had a baby at 40 and again at 47.

Her writing, which included novels, portraits, essays, and a large body of autobiographical prose, was admired by Proust and Gide. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt. When she died, aged 81, she was given a state funeral and buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

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