Colette

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The French author Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was concerned with feminine independence in experiencing the joys and sorrows of love. She succeeded in translating a delicate sensibility into a vivid, sensual, and highly imagistic prose.

On Jan. 28, 1873, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born in a small Burgundian town, Saint-Sauveuren-Puisaye. In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a Parisian littérateur of doubtful talents and morals. Gauthier-Villars, or Monsieur Willy, as he was known, forced his young wife to produce novels that would satisfy his prurient and financial interests. Her first attempt, Claudine à l'école (1900), signed Colette Willy, was quickly a best seller. Three more Claudine novels (Claudine à Paris, Claudine en ménage, Claudine s'en va), Minne, and Les égarements de Minne were produced in the following five years.

The marriage did not fare as well. After divorcing Willy in 1906, Colette became a music hall mime and traveled the circuits with moderate success for six years. But the discipline of writing imposed by Willy continued to hold her. Before her divorce she had published Dialogues des bêtes (1904) under her maiden name, and she continued to sign in this way her subsequent works, La Retraite sentimentale (1907), Les Vrilles de la vigne (1908), L'Ingénue libertine (1909), and La Vagabonde (1911). In 1909 she produced and starred in her first play, En Camarades.

From 1910 to 1923 Colette was the literary correspondent for the newspaper Le Matin. In 1912 she married her editor in chief, Henri de Jouvenel, and the following year they had a daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, whom Colette called "Bel-Gazou" in her writings. Although the marriage ended after 12 years, these were especially full years for Colette. She published La Paix chez les bêtes (1916), a collection of animal stories, and Les Heures longues (1917), a collection of her articles and travel notes; with Mitsou (1919) and Chéri (1920), she entered into her maturity as a novelist and artist, producing a string of masterpieces of the love novel that was to end with Gigi (1944). The heroes and heroines of these novels, which include Le Blé en herbe (1923), La Fin de Chéri (1926), La Seconde (1929), Duo (1934), Le Toutounier (1939), and Julie de Carneilhan (1941), resemble in many respects those of Colette's early novels. Her preoccupations are still childhood, adolescent love, jealousy, love rebuked, and the search for absolute happiness in physical love.

In 1925 Colette met Maurice Goudeket, a young businessman turned journalist, with whom she was to have her longest and happiest liaison. They were married on April 3, 1935, and were not separated until Colette's death. During her later years Colette was progressively immobilized by arthritis, but she continued to record her impressions, recollections, and fantasies. She published De ma fenêtre (1942), L'étoile vesper (1946), and Le Fanal bleu (1949), all semiautobiographical works reflecting the years of World War II in Paris.

Official recognition came soon after the war. In 1945 Colette was elected to the Académie Goncourt, over which she presided beginning in 1949, and in 1952 to the Légion d'Honneur. She died in Paris on Aug. 3, 1954.

Further Reading

Two important critical studies of Colette's life and work are Elaine Marks, Colette (1960), and Margaret Davies's succinct Colette (1961). Also useful are Margaret Crosland, Madame Colette (1953), and Maurice Goudeket, Close to Colette (1957).

Additional Sources

Album Colette: iconographie, Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Colette, Recollections: includes Journey for myself and The evening star, New York: Collier Books, 1986.

Crosland, Margaret, Colette - the difficulty of loving: a biography, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.

Dormann, Genevieve, Colette, a passion for life, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985.

Lottman, Herbert R., Colette: a life, Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.

Massie, Allan, Colette, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1986.

Mitchell, Yvonne, Colette: a taste for life, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Richardson, Joanna, Colette, New York: F. Watts, 1984, 1983.

Sarde, Michele, Colette: free and fettered, New York: Morrow, 1980.

Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle (1873-1954). Colette, who published her early work under the names of Willy and Colette Willy, was long regarded as a writer limited historically to the belle époque and the Third Republic and thematically to minor genres of psychological and nature writing. Her reputation has increased significantly, however, particularly through feminist criticism, so that she is now regarded, not only as a major 20th-c. woman writer, but also as a major literary figure of the first half of the century.

She was born in the Burgundian village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. Her father was a retired army captain; invalided out of the army when his leg was amputated, he had become the local tax-inspector. Her mother, Sidonie, who is celebrated in much of her later work, such as La Maison de Claudine (1922) and Sido (1929), was a major influence upon her, both through the establishment of a loving maternal relationship and through her introduction of her daughter to the world of nature, which became such an important part of Colette's later work. This idyllic childhood was overshadowed by constant financial difficulties, which led in part to her early marriage in 1893 to Henri Gauthier-Villars who, under the name of Willy, was making a reputation for himself as a journalist and popular novelist. This reputation was based in large part on his extensive exploitation of nègres, poor writers who produced work to Willy's prescription which was published under his name. Colette was immediately enrolled into this group and, using material from her own adolescence, with titillating detail added at Willy's instruction, produced the four phenomenally successful Claudine novels, Claudine à l'école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s'en va (1903), and the two Minne novels, Minne (1904) and Les Égarements de Minne (1905).

This literary slavery, compounded by Willy's constant infidelities, caused the marriage to break up definitively in 1906, and Colette embarked upon a period of what was considered scandalous independence, appearing until 1913 as a music-hall artiste, often in sketches and plays adapted from her own novels, such as Claudine à Paris, and forming, until 1910, a liaison with the marquise de Morny, known as ‘Missy’. At the same time she began to assert her literary independence. Two novels, La Retraite sentimentale (1907) and L'Ingénue libertine (1909), were still very much under the shadow of Willy's popular style, but La Vagabonde (1910), with its evocation of the world of the music-hall and its exploration of the assertion of independence of its heroine, breaks new ground and establishes a very real originality.

Colette's period of bohemianism ended in 1912 with her marriage to Baron Henry de Jouvenel, with whom she had one daughter, ‘Bel-Gazou’, born in 1913. It was during the 12-year marriage to de Jouvenel that Colette established herself firmly as a writer, particularly through Chéri (1920), probably her best-known novel, Le Blé en herbe (1923), and the beginning of a whole series of personal reminiscences with La Maison de Claudine (1922).

Her second marriage ended in 1924, and in 1925 she met Maurice de Goudeket, whom she was to marry in 1935 and who remained with her until her death. Until the war her writing consisted of novels, such as La Fin de Chéri (1926), La Seconde (1929), La Chatte (1933), and Duo (1934), and an increasingly successful body of autobiographical and semi-fictional work, such as La Naissance du jour (1928), Sido (1929), Le Pur et l'impur (originally Ces plaisirs, 1932), and Mes apprentissages (Ce que Claudine n'a pas dit) (1936). She spent the war years in Paris, concerned for the safety of her Jewish husband, and produced two volumes of memoirs about the period, Journal à rebours (1941) and De ma fenêtre (1942), as well as two novels, Julie de Carneilhan (1941) and Gigi (1944), and two collections of short stories, Chambre d'hôtel (1940) and Le Képi (1943), which mark a return to the belle époque and the subject-matter of the earlier fiction. From the Liberation to her death, she was one of the major figures of the French literary establishment.

Colette's work has too often been considered to be limited by its historical time-scale and by its subject-matter (the role of woman). This is because her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, is essentially autobiographical. Yet it uses autobiography to establish a general vision which is comprehensive and challenging. Her works are concerned with the progress towards authenticity: against the corruption and hypocrisy of belle époque society and the prevailing and continuing male-dominated way of seeing, she explores sexual and emotional relationships, the process of ageing, and the acceptance of a wholeness of existence in the world of nature. The key to her work is in the vision itself: not merely in the extraordinarily acute powers of observation for which she was so justly praised, but in the rectification of that male-dominated way of seeing. This required the construction of a new perception and a new style in which to embody it.

[Nicholas Hewitt]

Bibliography

• Y. Resch, Corps féminin, corps textuel (1973)
• N. Ward Jouve, Colette (1987)
• D. Holmes, Colette (1991)

Quotes:

"One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave."

"You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly."

"Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss..."

"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."

"And what a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised."

"But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious."

See more famous quotes by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Biography

Colette was a French screenwriter. She got her start as a film critic around 1916 and then became famous for her novels. As a screenwriter, she would usually adapt her own work either by herself or in conjunction with another. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

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