Background
Sidonie-Gabrielle was born on January 28, 1873, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, France. She was a daughter of war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), nėe Landoy.
Colette, painted c. 1896 by Jacques Humbert
Colette's tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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Sidonie-Gabrielle was born on January 28, 1873, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, France. She was a daughter of war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), nėe Landoy.
Sidonie-Gabrielle attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17 - this was, nevertheless, fairly extensive education for a girl of the period.
Sidonie-Gabrielle husband forced her 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 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. 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.
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 August 3, 1954.
Her best known work, the novella Gigi (1944), was the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same name.
Initially considered a limited if talented novelist (despite the outspoken admiration in her lifetime of figures such as André Gide and Henri de Montherlant), she has been increasingly recognised as an important voice in women's writing.
Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash paid tribute to the writer in the song, "The Summer I Read Colette", on her 1996 album 10 Song Demo.
Truman Capote wrote a short story about her (1970) called "The White Rose".
"Lucette Stranded on the Island" by Julia Holter, from her 2015 album Have You in My Wilderness, is based on a minor character from Colette's short story Chance Acquaintances.
In the 2018 film Colette the novelist is played by Keira Knightley.
Quotations:
"Chance, my master and my friend, will, I feel sure, deign once again to send me the spirits of his unruly kingdom. All my trust is now in him- and in myself. But above all in him, for when I go under he always fishes me out, seizing and shaking me like a life-saving dog whose teeth tear my skin a little every time. So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days."
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
"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."
"By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet."
"There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."
"Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings."
In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a Parisian littérateur of doubtful talents and morals. They divorced in 1906.
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.
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.
