'A perpetual feast to the reader.her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful' Raymond Mortimer
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.
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*
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*
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