Colette

At 81 years old, Colette has this physical status:

Sidonie Colette (French: [k.l.t] [r]; 28 January 1873-August 3, 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French writer and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the inspiration for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage version of the same name. In France, her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also popular.

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Life and career

Sidonie Colette was born on January 28th, 1873, to war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905) and his wife Adèle Sidonie ("Sido") in the department of Yonne, Burgundy, née Landoy (1835–19212). Jules-Joseph Colette was a soldier of the Saint-Cyr military academy in Mont-Cyr. In the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where his children were born, he was given a post as a tax collector. Colette was the youngest of four children. She had three older siblings: Héloose, an older maternal half-brother, Edmé (1863–1913), and her older brother, Léopold (1866–?). Colette attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17. The family was initially well off, but poor financial management drastically reduced their income.

Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars (1859-1931), a well-known writer and publisher who used the pen name "Willy." Claudine à l'école (1900), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s'en va (1903) were among her first four novels – the four Claudine stories: Claudine à la l'école (1901), Claudine à la cade (1902), and Claudine en ménage (1903) – all under her name. (The four children were published in English as Claudine at School, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie.) The novels explore the transition and young adulthood of their titular heroine, Claudine, from an unconventional fifteen-year-old boy in a Burgundian village to a doyenne of the turn-of-the-century Paris's literary salons. The tale is semi-autobiographical, though Claudine, unlike Colette, is motherless.

Colette was able to dedicate her time to writing after her marriage to Gauthier-Villars. She later said that if it had not been for Willy, she would not have become a writer. He introduced his wife into avant-garde academic and artistic circles, as well as one of Paris's most popular libertines. "The secondary myth of Sappho... the girls' school or convent was ruled by a seductive female tutor," the narrator's novel "The titillating subject matter of the Claudine novels was chosen by a male tutor." Willy "locked her [Colette] in her room until she had enough pages to suit him," Willy says.

Colette and Willy divorced in 1906, but their divorce was not final until 1910. Colette had no access to the massive Claudine books until 1912, starting with Willy's copyright, performing Claudine in sketches from her own books, earning barely enough money to survive and often hungry and sick, until the end meet. Around this time, she became a keen amateur photographer. In La Vagabonde (1910), which explores women's liberation in a male culture, a theme to which she would return often in future roles.

She began a lifetime of friendships with other women, including Natalie Clifford Barney and Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Morny, with whom she occasionally shared the stage. Max and Colette's onstage kiss in a pantomime named "Rêve d'Égypte" on January 3rd 1907 sparked a near-riot, but they were no longer able to work together openly, but their friendship lasted for another five years.

Colette married Henry de Jouvenel, Le Matin's editor, in 1912. Colette de Jouvenel, a daughter of the Bel-Gazou family, was born in 1913.

Chéri, a 1920 Colette film, depicting the passion between an elderly woman and a much younger man. Chéri is the lover of Léa, a wealthy courtesan; Léa is devastated when Chéri marries a child his own age and excited as he returns to her, but Chéri says she will take him away again after one last night together.

Colette's marriage to Jouvenel ended in 1924, partly due to her infidels and partially to her affair with her 16-year-old stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel. Maurice Goudeket, her final husband, married her in 1925; the couple lived together until her death.

Colette was a young writer when she was first published (The Vagabond had three votes for the coveted Prix Goncourt). The decades of the 1920s and 1930s were the most productive and innovative period in the twentieth century. During the Belle Époque, her work mainly set in Burgundy or Paris and concentrated on marital life and sexuality. Chéri (1920) and Le Blé en Herbe (1923) both deal with love between an elderly woman and a young man, a situation that was reflected in Bertrand de Jouvenel's and her third husband Goudeket, who was 16 years old when she was an undergraduate. In reflection on age and the renunciation of love by her mother, Sido, La Naissance du Jour (1928) is her explicit critique of the daily lives of women.

Colette was frequently praised as France's best female writer by this time. "It... has no plot, and yet tells of three lives every single thing that should be known," Janet Flanner of Sido (1929). "She has been praised for her creativity, humanities, and flawless prose by those literary journals that have years ago," she writes, "except for the finger of scorn."

Elissa Rhas, a Jewish-Algerian writer who adopted a Muslim identity in order to promote her books during the 1920s, was closely associated with her during the 1920s.

Colette was 67 years old when the Germans defeated and occupied France, and she stayed in Paris in her Palais-Royal flat. Maurice Goudeket, a Jewish immigrant, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released after seven weeks after the French ambassador's wife's rescue, Colette survived the remainder of the war years without fear of a second arrest. Journal à Rebours (1941) and De ma Fenêtre (1942); the two were published in English in 1975 as Looking Backwards). Julie de Carneilhan (1941), a writer who wrote lifestyle columns for several pro-Nazi newspapers (cf Colette the Journalist), and her book Julie de Carneilhan (1941) contains many anti-Semitic slurs.

Colette's Gigi, which tells the tale of sixteen-year-old Gilberte ("Gigi") Alvar in 1944, became her most well-known piece, although it wasn't until recently that she published what became her most popular piece, Gigi. Born in a family of demimondaines, Gigi is trained as a courtesan to seduce a wealthy woman but defies the custom by marrying him instead. Danièle Delorme and Gaby Morlay's 1949 French film premiered in 1949, then adapted for the stage with then-unknown Audrey Hepburn in the title role, which Colette personally selected; the 1958 Hollywood musical film starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan and a score by Lerner and Frederick Loewe received the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Colette became a popular public figure in the postwar years, crippled by arthritis and cared for by Goudeket, who supervised the creation of her oeuvres Complètes (1948 – 1950). During those years, she continued to write, including L'Etoile Vesper (1944) and Le Fanal Bleu (1949), in which she discussed the writer's inspirations are primarily autobiographical. In 1948, Claude Farrère nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Colette's first pieces of journalism (1895-1900) were written in partnership with her partner, Gauthier-Villars — music reviews for La Cocarde, a daily published by Maurice Barres, as well as a collection of works for La Fronde. Following her divorce from Gauthier-Villars in 1910, she wrote for a number of journals, winning a slew of accolades for her articles on social trends, fashion, and film, as well as crime reporting." Colette decided to write a daily column in Le Matin in December 1910, first under a pseudonym, then as "Colette Willy." Henry de Jouvenel, who married in 1912, was one of her editors. Colette had already learned to be a reporter by 1912: "You must see and not invent, and not invent," Colette says of the sheets [at a crime scene] drenched in fresh blood is a hue you could never imagine." Colette was named Le Matin's literary editor in 1914. Colette's separation from Jouvenel in 1923 caused her to sever ties with Le Matin. Her articles appeared in more than two dozen publications, including Vogue, Le Figaro, and Paris-Soir over the course of three decades. Colette continued contributing to daily and weekly newspapers, many of whom were collaborationist and pro-Nazi, including Le Petit Parisien, which became a pro-Nazi in January 1941, and La Gerbe, a pro-Nazi weekly, despite the French Occupation. Colette's writings, although not political in nature, had been chastised for lenting her authority to these publications and implicitly promoting the Vichy regime. "Ma Bourgogne Pauvre" ("My Poor Burgundy"), her November 26, 1942 book, has been singled out by some commentators as tactically supporting some of the ultra-nationalist ideals that hardline Vichyist writers had argued for. Her reporting was sporadic after 1945, and her final pieces were more personal essays than published ones. Colette has published over 1200 papers in newspapers, journals, and journals over the course of her writing career.

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