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Colette

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Chéri and Gigi, and one of France's outstanding writers had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy in 1873, into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she was brought to Paris by her first husband, the notorious Henri Gauthiers-Villars (Willy), writer and critic. By dint of locking her in her room, Willy forced Colette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. But their marriage (chronicled in Mes Apprentissages) was never happy and Colette left him in 1906. She spent the next six years on the stage - an experience, like that of her country childhood, which would provide many of the themes for her work. She remarried (Julie de Carneilhan 'is as close a reckoning with the elements of her second marriage as she ever allowed herself'), later divorcing her second husband, by whom she had a daughter. In 1935 she married Maurice Goudeket, with whom she lived until her death in 1954.

With the publication of Chéri (1920), Colette's place as one of France's prose masters became assured. Although she became increasingly crippled with arthritis, she never lost her intense preoccupation with everything around her. 'I cannot interest myself in anything that is not life,' she said: and, to a younger writer, 'Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you'. Her rich and supple prose, with its sensuous detail and sharp psychological insights, illustrates that personal philosophy.

Her writing runs to fifteen volumes: novels, portraits, essays, chroniques and a large body of autobiographical prose. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died was given a state funeral and buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.