Gigi

Everything that Colette touched became human * The Times *
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 … One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris * New York Times *
By turns revolutionary and retrograde, liberated and conservative, a traditionalist who defied labels and loved a title, Colette was nothing if not contradictory. Both her life and her body of work were epic – Sadie Stein * New York Times *
Colette was in herself a French experiment in life. Her writing was born of her insatiable curiosity for life and love – Agnès Poirier * The Times *
The most beloved French writer of all time * BBC Culture *

Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France, and 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. The 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 young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954.

Belinda Jack

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

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