Colette
| Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette | |
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| Born |
28 January 1873 Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, France |
| Died | 3 August 1954 (aged 81) Paris, France |
| Pen name | Colette |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | French |
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| Signature | .svg) |
Colette (French: [kɔ.lɛt]; Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) was a French novelist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Her best known work, the novella Gigi (1944), was the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same name. She was also a mime, an actress and a journalist.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on January 28, 1873, to war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), nėe Landoy, in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the département of Yonne, Burgundy. The family was initially well off, but by the time she was of school age poor financial management had substantially reduced her father's income and she attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17—this was, nevertheless, a fairly extensive education for a girl of the period.
In 1893 she married Henry Gauthier-Villars (1859–1931) or 'Willy', his nom-de-plume, a well-known author and publisher, and her first four novels—the four Claudine stories, Claudine à l'école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en menage (1902), and Claudine s'en va (1903)—appeared under his name. They chart the coming of age of their heroine, Claudine, from an unconventional fifteen-year-old in a Burgundian village to the literary salons of turn-of-the-century Paris. (The four are published in English as Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie). The story they tell is semi-autobiographical, but not entirely—most strikingly, Claudine, unlike Colette, is motherless.
Willy, fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, introduced Colette into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while engaging in sexual affairs and encouraging her own lesbian dalliances. It was he who chose the titillating subject-matter of the Claudine novels, "the secondary myth of Sappho...the girls' school or convent ruled by a seductive female teacher" (Ladimer, p. 53). Colette later said that she would never have become a writer if not for Willy.
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