Saturday, January 29, 2022

Heroine of the Weekend: Colette


 This weekend's heroine is the writer Colette, born on January 28, 1873!  


Born in the Burgundy village of Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye to a war hero father and his wife, the family was orginally prosperous but suffered finanical reversals.  She married in 1893 to Henri Gauthier-Villars ("Willy"), a writer and publisher 14 years her senior.  Her first 4 books (the "Claudine" titles) were published under his name and copywright.  When they separated in 1906 (and later divorced in 1910), she had no income from her own writings.  She worked in journalism and on the music hall stage, as well as practicing as an amateur photographer.  She also had relationships with several women, including the famous Natalie Barney, as she continued her writing.

In 1912, she married Henri de Jouvenal, and in 1913 had her daughter ('Bel-Gazou").  She published her very popular (and scandalous!) Cheri in 1920, and her writing career took off quickly.  She was divorced again in 1924, and in 1925 married Maurice Goudeket, who was her husband for the rest of her life.

The 1920s and '30s were very productive for her work, and she was acclaimed as France's greatest female writer.  She was 67 when the Germans occupied France, and she stayed in her Paris apartment on the Palais-Royal despite the arrest of her Jewish husband in 1941 (he was quickly released, and they spent the rest of the war quietly).  In 1944, she wrote her most famous work, Gigi.  Postwar, she was famous but ill with arthritis, nursed by her husband, and continued to write.  (She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948).  When she died on August 3, 1954, she was the first French woman of letters to receive a state funeral, and was buried in Pere Lachaise.

A couple of sources for her fascinating life:

Judith Thompson, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999)

Annie Goetzinger, The Provocative Colette (2018)

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