Colette’s France, by Jane Gilmour – review

Monstrous innocence’ was the ruling quality that Colette claimed in both her life and books. Protesting her artless authenticity, she was sly in devising her newspaper celebrity and ruthless in imposing her personal myths. She posed as provincial ingénue, wide-eyed young wife of the Paris belle époque, scandalous lesbian, risqué music-hall performer, novelist of prodigious output, theatre reviewer, beautician, seducer, the most feline of cat-lovers and, ultimately, garlanded literary lioness.

Yet her phoniness should not deter people from reading her books. Although most of her work resembled an imaginary autobiography, it was never self-obsessed or constricting. On the contrary, she used her fictionalised self as the centrepiece of a worldly comedy with a cool, sane vision which skewered the moralising humbug of the Third Republic and lampooned a patriarchy of pompous, empty, third-rate men.  She is playful, teasing, supple; full of gaiety and zest; and an exquisite stylist, so rich and simple, exact and clear, perceptive and shrewd. Rereading her, one finds that her creed of sexual and emotional fulfilment has scarcely dated. Her dialogue remains as crisp and suggestive as ever. The air of audacity has not staled, even if the lovers’ anguish seems contrived. And always she remains a glorious, lyrical observer of natural beauty.

Colette — Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette — was born in 1873 in the wooded, charcoal-producing area of Burgundy, far from the fashionable vineyards. Her charming, defeatist father had been invalided out of the army after his leg was amputated. Her lively, clever mother took Corneille’s plays to read in church under cover of a prayer-book. The family’s dwindling finances catapulted Colette into marriage at the age of 20 to Henri Gauthier-Villars. This rascal had a stable of poor hacks — known as nègres — who churned out journalism and novels which he published as his own work under the nom de plume of Willy.