Colette

Born in 1873, when the Third Republic was two years old, Colette that most French of writers, became the poet of that most French of French regimes.

Almost everything she wrote was drawn from her own experience of the France of her youth: the bourgeois preoccupations and idyllic pleasures of her provincial childhood, the superficial glamour of the Parisian demi-monde that she entered on her marriage to the extraordinary Willy, the sleazy glitter of her music-hall years with her scandalous performances, passionate friendships and lesbian affairs.

Through her writing, at once sensuous and exact, subjective and objective, Colette liberated herself from the constraints of the male-dominated society in which she lived, to establish her independence as a woman, to claim her freedom, while still retaining her femininity. She never felt it necessary to discard or deny her past: she always dealt tenderly and evocatively with life and love, the androgynous element in her own nature enabling her to write, as no other woman has, with as much compassion and understanding of men as she did of women.