Creating Colette: null

The Provocative, Audacious, sometimes scandalous Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was one of the century's great writers and, as we learn from Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier in their exhaustively researched biography, her finest creation may have been herself -- or her many selves, for throughout her life Colette would recreate herself again and again. In this first of two volumes, the authors return to the rural village of Colette's childhood, the place she would later shape into her Claudine novels, to shed new light on her crucial relationship with her mother, Sido. Far from being the penniless orphan or the wise Burgundian housewife variously described in Colette's writings, Sido was herself a passionate sensualist with a philosophy of life and style of living that would powerfully influence her talented daughter.Included in this volume is her turbulent marriage to Henry Gauthier Villars when the then 21-year old ingenue was embraced by the Paris avant-garde, her scandal-filled career as a nude dancer, and the wild years when she was lavishly kept by the emperor's niece, the Marquise de Morny, and became the darling of Paris Lesbos. Her tumultuous life and her complex, often ambiguous works are fully reexamined in this definitive two-part biography, and as the authors painstakingly dismantle each of the many myths that have surrounded Colette, the woman who emerges appears an even greater writer, and one of the most original thinkers of our time.

It's unfortunate that novelist, actress and enfant terrible Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) is best known in America through the movie based on her novel Gigi. That saccharine musical rendition makes it difficult to imagine the novelist's hold on Colettolatres (as French devotees are called). This life by biographers of Proust and de Beauvoir takes the sugar out and puts the saltiness back in. Volume I traces Colette's transformation from schoolgirl to literary and theatrical star?leaving her shortly before her divorce from her infamously exploitative husband, Henri Gauthier-Villars (Willy)?and portrays an androgynous, often crude literary lioness of fin-de-siecle Paris. Indeed, the city is almost as much a part of this volume as Colette and her fictional alter ego, Claudine. And what a city it is, with Marcel Proust, Anatole France, Paul Valery, Stephane Mallarme and other articulate intellectuals etched against a backdrop of sparkling words, falling into a sea of ether, opium, wine and decadent sex. As with previous biographers Herbert Lottman and Joanna Richardson, the tone is determinedly dispassionate; the authors create their picture through the persistent, telegraphic piling on of detail: "Colette and Willy traveled to the Riviera; Colette was booked to dance Le Faune in Monte Carlo. They spent March with Renee Vivien in her Villa Cessoles in the hills above Nice...." The neutral narrative voice combined with the difficulty of identifying what is important in an erratic story are weaknesses, but the wealth of detail gives this the hallmark of a definitive biography.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Any biography of the celebrated French author of Gigi, Chri, and the Claudine novels would have to be replete with juicily scandalous detail. This entry, covering the first half of her life, does not disappoint. Colette's novels of the demimonde and Parisian caf society were noteworthy for both their high quality and their autobiographical content. Her numerous marriages, and her hetero and lesbian affairs, provided Colette with a subject and a lifestyle that made her one of the notorious fin-de-sicle celebrities. Francis and Gontier (co-authors of Simone de Beauvoir: A Life, A Love Story, 1987, etc.) sift through rumor, legend, and shadowy fact to piece together a life that would cause modern jet-setters to blanch, perhaps. Colette's contention that she had black ancestors has usually been dismissed by her biographers as a literary conceitas yet another example of her self-promotional efforts. Here, though, the authors dig deep to follow her maternal lineage to a black grandfather from Martinique. They also make great strides at dispelling Colette's bitter late-career assertion that she was bullied into writing by her first husband, the publishing scion Henry Gauthier-Villara. Known as Willy, he was a leading literary figure of the day and, in fact, collaborated with his wife on dozens of novels, essays, and plays. He also gave her syphilis. Colette and Willy both conducted numerous affairs, she (notably) with the Marquise de Morny. Known as ``Frances most notorious cross-dresser,'' Missy, as she was called, and Colette staged a pantomime that summoned the police. Colette's oeuvre remains of mild interest. Colette the woman is eternally fascinating. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Spurred by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's (1873-1954) allusions to her African ancestry and the belief that she cannot be understood without knowing the "ultraradical cultural background of her maternal family," Francis and Gontier, coauthors of biographies of Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir, base this biography on their study of her family background. They dispel misconceptions of Colette as a country girl corrupted by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars ("Willy"), as they explore the influence of Sido, Colette's mother and a follower of Fourierism, in shaping the life of the first French woman writer to be accorded a formal state funeral. Colette "feasted on life," and the biographers vividly chronicle how she did so, at least for her first 40 years. This compelling biography ends abruptly with the observation that "her life was going to take an unexpected turn," reminding the reader that the second volume is yet to come. Recommended for academic libraries.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.