Colette: A Life

The remarkable life of the legendary Colette (1873-1953) writer, stage performer, heartbreaker (of both men and women), and center of Parisian social life for 50 years. Lots of great photographs. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The celebrated French writer, who emerged from a small Burgundy town a rustic innocent to take Paris by storm and eventually become a national monument, had surely one of the strangest lives of any literary figure. Married to her dominating "collaborator," a Parisian wit and journalist called, simply, Willy, she also dabbled in lesbianism and eventually went on the cabaret stage. Though apparently no great shakes as actress or dancer, her vitality and sensuality made her a draw. Out of her second major heterosexual liaison her only daughter was born, and late in life she married again. She lived under the Nazi occupation, leaving a hint of collaboration, and died in 1954, 80 years old and much honored. She always worked hard, slaving against deadlines for magazines and newspapers when not on tour with the cabaret, writing novels in installments, stories, sketches, reviews and endless letters. She even launched her own cosmetics line. Perhaps overfaced with this polymath, Lottman, an admired literary historian (as well as PW's international correspondent) has fashioned a careful, painstaking biography that is far less spectacular than its subject. The facts are all here, splendidly researched, but more color is needed to bring this remarkable woman fully to life. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Though best known for the novel Gigi , which won acclaim as a film starring Audrey Hepburn, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was also an actress and noted member of Parisian society as well as a prolific novelist read by people of all classes. Not a feminist in the modern sense of the word, she did feature female protagonists dissatisfied with the traditional roles available in bourgeois France. Lottman, author of Albert Camus ( LJ 2/15/79) and Flaubert (Little, Brown, 1989), has now written the first comprehensive account of her extraordinary life. He has interwoven Colette's personal history with the evolution of her artistic creations, illuminating her intelligence while illustrating her flair for flouting the mundane. Following her through her three marriages, he shows how she evolved as a writer while exploring her own sensuality, and how her works initiated a change in the way that men and women view each other. Recommended for public libraries. (Illustrations not seen.)-- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.