Claudine's House

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France * New York Times Book Review *Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful * Vogue *Brilliant, a novelist who prized the body over the mind… [her novels offer a] devastating portrait of beauty, seduction and the ravages of time – Michael LaPointe * The New Yorker *France’s foremost woman of letters …[although] she did not invent the Modern French Woman in fiction, [she supplied] the organs, the accuracies, the mind and the heart * TIME *

Colette (Author)

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France. She would later recall her bucolic home and eccentric family in the semi-fictionalized Claudine’s House. At the age of twenty, she married the publisher and author ‘Willy’, who encouraged her to write her first four novels. These novels made her famous, but her husband, under whose name they had been published, retained her earnings.

Escaping her marriage, Colette became a performer in France’s music halls, an era of her life she would later describe in The Vagabond. She wrote her most famous works during the 1920s and 30s. These included Cheri, depicting a relationship between an older woman and a young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954.

Belinda Jack (Translator)

Belinda Jack is the author of an acclaimed biography of George Sand and Beatrice’s Spell—The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.