Colette was not merely the most famous writer of her day, but one of the most famous people, period. A demimondaine with a shocking reputation, by the time of her death, in 1954, Colette was an institution, the first French woman of letters ever honored with a state funeral. (The church denied her a Catholic burial on the grounds of her multiple divorces.)
By turns revolutionary and retrograde, liberated and conservative, a traditionalist who defied labels and loved a title, Colette was nothing if not contradictory. Both her life (81 years long) and her body of work (which exceeded 40 books) were epic, and given that her writing was so often autobiographical, the two were inextricably conflated in the public mind. But if anything, her notoriety obscured the greatness of her prose: Her event-filled life often overshadowed the accomplishments of her best-selling fiction.
Born in Burgundy in 1873, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette married at the age of 20 and moved to Paris with her husband, the dissolute, publicity-hungry writer and publisher known as “Willy.” Her first novels (the “Claudine” series, about the coming-of-age of a precocious Burgundian schoolgirl and published under her husband’s name) were wildly successful. Meanwhile, the Colette-Willys — bohemian, avant-garde and in and out of complex ménages — took Paris by storm. When the pair divorced, Colette, without access to her earnings, turned to journalism and to the traveling music hall stage, where her scanty costumes, cross-dressing and much-hyped kiss with her real-life lover Mathilde de Morny ( “Max”), the Marquise de Belbeuf, cemented her sulfureuse reputation.
1910’s “The Vagabond,” a fictionalization of her years in the theater, established Colette as a popular writer in her own right; 1920’s “Chéri” and its sequel (based in part on her affair with her second husband’s teenage son, and, later, her much younger third husband) were regarded as instant classics. A tireless worker, Colette spent the 1920s and ’30s producing novels, short stories, plays and memoirs. Although she wrote women’s interest pieces for pro-Nazi journals throughout the Occupation, she retained her exalted position (and, some would argue, the freedom of her Jewish third husband).
