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Colette

The Knitting Circle: Literature

Biography,work,bibliography.

French novelist and journalist.

Her original name was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

She has sometimes been known as Colette Willy.

Her mother was Adele-Eugenie-Sidonie, but called Sido. Her father, Jules Colette, was an army captain who fought in the Crimea and lost a leg in the Italian campaign. He then became a tax collector.

In 1893, aged 20, Colette went to Paris to marry Henri Gauthier-Villars. Colette's early novels, in theClaudineseries, were published by, Henri Gauthier-Villars, under his pen name 'Willy'. InClaudine à l'École, (1900), (Claudine At School), Claudine, a tomboyish girl of 15, develops an intense crush on a pretty assistant mistress, Aimée. This is the first time in modern literature in which a girl looks at another woman and describes her as an object of pleasure. Colette's collaboration with Henri Gauthier-Villars ended in 1904, and from then until 1916 she wrote under the name Colette Willy. They divorced in 1906.

She then began to work in music halls, performing in dance and mime. She liked to shock by baring her breasts. Her music hall experiences provided material forL'Envers du music-hall, (1913), (Music Hall Sidelights, 1957).

She had numerous affairs with women. One of them was the youngest daughter of the Duc de Morny, Mathilde, known as Missy, with whom Colette lived in a château. After a brief marriage Missy had become the Marquise de Belboeuf, but she became well known in Paris lesbian circles as Monsieur Belboeuf. Colette and Missy caused a scandal with a mime piece at the Moulin Rouge in which Colette was an Egyptian mummy who unwrapped her bandages and kissed Missy as the cross-dressed archaeologist. The 15-minute item was banned by the Paris police commissioner.

Colette also became a great love of the US-born writer Natalie Barney (1876-1972) who appears as 'Flossie' in theClaudineseries of novels.

InThe Pure and The Impure, (1941), Colette includes sketches of Parisian lesbians including Missy as 'La Chevaliere'.

Colette wrote to Una Troubridge, the lover ofRadclyffe Hall, to explain that she disagreed with the view expressed in 'The Well of Loneliness' of lesbian love as abnormal.

Colette had a column as drama critic in the newspaperLe Matin, and there was a further scandal when she eloped with Henry de Jouvenal, the editor-in-chief of the paper. With Henry de Jouvenal she accidentally conceived her only child, a daughter, Colette Renée de Jouvenal, out of wedlock. Her mother gave her the provencal nickname, Bel-Gazou, that her own father had given her. Colette and Henry de Jouvenal then married in 1912.

In World War I Colette was sent as a reporter to the Italian front.

In 1920 Claire Boas, the previous wife of Henry de Jouvenal, introduced their 16-year-old son, Bertrand de Jouvenel, to Collete. During the holidays on the Breton coast that summer Bertrand lost his virginity to the 47-year-old Colette. The events paralleled Colette's novelChéri, which was being serialised at the time inLa Vie Parisienne, and is about an older woman's affair with a younger man. Colette's second marriage came to an end when her husband heard of the affair, and they divorced in 1923.

Colette's third husband was the pearl dealer Maurice Goudeket, who was 16 years younger, and whom she married in 1935 at the age of 63. They settled permanently at the Palais-Royal in Paris.

Among her literary friends were Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais.

In 1928 Colette became a member of the Legion of Honour, and 1936 she was made a commander. She later became a grand officer.

In 1936 she was elected to the Royal Academy of Language and Literature of Belgium.

In 1945 she was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Goncourt, and in 1949 she was made its president. The National Institute of Arts and Letters in the USA awarded her its diploma.

In 1951 her novelGigi, (1944), was produced as a Broadway show starring Audrey Hepburn. A US film was made in 1958.

When she died Colette became the first woman to be honoured with a French state funeral.

• Claudine à l'École, 1900, (Claudine At School).

• La Vagabonde, 1910, (English translation 1912).

• L'Envers du music-hall, 1913, (Music Hall Sidelights, 1957).

• La Paix chez les bètes, 1916.

• Mitsou, 1919.

• Chéri, 1920, (English translation byJanet Flanner, 1929).

• La Maison de Claudine, 1922, (English translationMy Mother's House, 1953).

• Le Blé en herbe, 1923.

• La Fin de Chéri, 1926, (English translationThe Last of Chéri, 1932).

• Sido, 1929, (English translation 1953).

• La Naissance du jour, 1932, (Break of Day).

• La Chatte, 1933, (English translationThe Cat, 1936).

• The Pure and the Impure, 1941.

• Le Képi, 1943.

• Gigi, 1944, (English translation 1953).

• Paris de ma fenêtre, 1944.

• L'Étoile Vesper, 1946, (English translationThe Evening Star, 1973).

• La Fanal bleu, 1949, (English translationThe Blue Lantern, 1953).

• Collected Stories, 1958, edited by Robert Phelps, published by Martin Secker and Warburg.
  Nuits Blanches, 1934, a short story reproduced inThe Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories.

• The Collected Stories of Colette, 1983.

• Tom Cowan,Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World

• Herbert Lottman, (1991), "e;Colette: A Life"e;

• J. Richardson, (1983), "e;Colette"e;

• Michèle Sarde, (1978), "e;Colette, libre et entravée"e;, Paris: Stock.

• Judith Thurman, (1999), "e;Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette"e;, Bloomsbury, 624 pages.

  • Femme de siècleby Judith Thurman inThe Observer Review, 17th. October, 1999, pages 1-3. "e;Colette was the literary rebel who scandalised turn-of-the-century Paris with her sex life. First a lesbian affair, then hercoup de théatre- the seduction of her 16-year-old stepson. In this extract from her acclaimed new biography, Judith Thurman lays bare their passion."e;

  • The empress of the sensesby Michèle Roberts inThe Independent: The Weekend Review, 23rd. October, 1999, page 11. "e;Colette (1873-1954) is a writer beloved of other writers for the excellence of her style. She is beloved of women, particularly, for her courage in raising two fingers to the moral and literary establishments of her time."e;

    "e;Colette's life, like her art, was deeply transgressive. She invented new forms for the novel, blending fantasy, sensual realism, letters, fictional autobiography and poetry to create not just one masterpiece but many. And she disobeyed the male rules about being a good woman and a single-minded artist. She also wrote for film, opera and theatre, was a war correspondent, an arts journalist, founded beauty salons and sold her own-recipe face cream."e;

    "e;Judith Thurman has written a wonderful biography, distinguished by its sensitivity, compassion and wit. Yet the outlines of Colette's life have been sketched many times, most notably in recent years by Michèle Sarde and Nicole Ward Jouve. Where Sarde produced a tender portrait that's perhaps a little too soft, Ward Jouve concentrated on the role of language in Colette's life, her relationship to its teasing ambiguities and deceptions."e;

  • Sexiest star in the theatre of resistanceby Elaine Showalter inThe Guardian Saturday Review, 30th. October, 1999, page 8. "e;After the war, she was much more outraged by the purge trials of collaborators than she had ever been by the Occupation. She was also hostile to feminism as a movement and declared that the suffragettes deserved 'the whip and the harem'. Nevertheless, Thurman locates Colette in the Parisian artistic demi-monde of homosexuals, New Women and Jews at the turn of the century and argues that this milieu provided her with her most radical 'theatre of resistance'. Colette's views on gender, if not politics, were subversive, and threatened to transgress the strict boundaries of national identity. Like her friend Jean Cocteau, she both played at being anenfant terribleand accepted the emotional consequences of her acts."e;

  • Tainted loveby Lucy Hughes-Hallett inThe Sunday Times Books, 31st. October, 1999, pages 38-39. "e;The life of her mind is as well documented as that of her heart. She left behind a great quantity of journalism (in her sixties, while maintaining a prolific fictional output, she was also writing a daily column for one paper while acting as drama critic for another). It demonstrates how much and with what discrimination she read. Those attempting to write her biography face formidable competition from the subject herself."e;

  • Colette's twist againbyEdmund WhiteinThe Observer Review, 31st. October, 1999, page 11. "e;If biography is all too often the revenge of little people against big ones, in the case ofSecrets of the Fleshthe biographer is as sophisticated as her subject. Not one of Colette's appalling moral flaws is minimised, but none freezes Thurman's sympathy for her subject."e;

    "e;There have been many books about Colette, but this is the only one in which the writing is as inventive and lively as the novelist's."e;

Biography,work,bibliography.

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The Knitting Circle

First uploaded 24th. October, 1999.

Last altered 21st. August, 2003