Claudine Married

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful – Raymond Mortimer, Vogue
This most French of all French writers … 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 *
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 *
Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France – New York Times Book Review
A perfectionist in her every word – Spectator
Everything that Colette touched became human * The Times *
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 – Judith Thurman, biographer of Colette

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy on 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and 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 Collette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. Colettte 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, had a baby at 40 and 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 Academie Goncourt, and when she died, aged 81, she was given a state funeral and buried in P re Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

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