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Colette, (Sidonie-Gabrielle) (b. Jan. 28, 1873, Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Burgundy, Fr,—d. Aug. 3, 1954, Paris), the outstanding French woman writer of the first half of the 20th century, whose novels, largely concerned with the pleasures and pains of love, are remarkable for their exact sensory evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colours. Reared in a village in Burgundy, where a kind and wise mother awakened her to the wonders of everything that “germinates, blossoms or flies,” she accepted the world as it was and wrote of love and nature with a mixture of innocence and guile and an acute observation that endeared her to five decades of readers, who, forgetting the scandals of her life, eventually made her a member of the Belgian Royal Academy (1935), the French Acad?mie Goncourt (1945), and a grand officer of the Legion d’Honneur—honours to which women rarely accede.
At 20, Colette married a would-be writer, Henri Gauthier-Villars, who introduced her to the troubled waters of the Parisian demimonde. He discovered her talent for writing and published the four “Claudine” novels (1900-03), reminiscences of an uninhibited young heroine, under his pen name, Willy. Turning from the semi-autobiographical adventures of a libertine ingenue, Colette wrote sensitively of animals, with whom she maintained a mischievous alliance against the disappointing world of men. At the same time her senses were enlivened by an almost animistic affection for plant life.
After her divorce in 1906, she became a music-hall performer. During these vagrant years, her attempts to achieve an independent womanhood inspired La Vagabonde (1910) and L’Envers du music-hall (1913).
In 1912, she married Henry de Jouvenel, editor in chief of the paper Le Matin, to which she contributed theatre chronicles and short stories. Their daughter (born 1913) is the BelGazou of the delightful animal story La Paix chez les b?tes (1916).
All these works belong to what Colette called her years of apprenticeship (Mes Apprenhissages, 1936). After 1920 came the decade of her masterpieces. A first group revolves around slightly depraved youth of post-World War I, such as the tainted hero of Ch?ri (1920) and La Fin de Ch?ri (1926), dealing with a liaison between a young man (Chdri) and an older woman; and the adolescents of Le Bl? en herbe (1923), which concerns a tender and acid initiation to love. In a second group, she looked back to the countryside of her enchanted childhood and away from the pleasures and disillusions of shallow love affairs. La Maison de Claudine (1922) and Sido (1930) are the poetic meditations of these years.
After 1930 she enjoyed 25 productive and serene years. In 1935 she married Maurice Goudeket, a writer. The marriage brought much happiness, interrupted, however, by her husband’s imprisonment by the Gestapo in World War II. Goudeket left his memoirs on their life together (Pr?s de Colette, 1955). Colette’s later works were diverse in theme: La Chatte (1933) and Duo (1934) are treatments of jealousy; Gigi (1944) is about a girl reared by two elderly sisters to become a courtesan; and L’Etoile vesper (1947) and Le Fanal bleu (1949) are reminiscences.
A delicate and humorous realist, she was the annalist of female existence, accepting with uncritical realism the traditional female roles of the husband hunter or the discarded, aging, or d?class? mistress. Her format was the novella; her style, a blend of the sophisticated and the natural, laced with all the subtle cadences of sensuous pleasures and intuitive acumen. From 1949 she was increasingly crippled by arthritis. She ended her days, a legendary figure, surrounded by her beloved cats, confined to her beautiful Palais-Royal apartment overlooking Paris.
