Colette (Magill Book Reviews)

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born on January 28, 1873, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, a provincial town 120 miles south of Paris. Colette’s father, Captain Jules Colette, had lost a leg in battle; the town tax collector, he nourished unfulfilled literary ambitions. Her mother, Adele Sidonie Colette (nicknamed Sido), was an avid reader who taught Colette to read at a very early age and provided her with a steady supply of novels. (Colette recalled that she was seven years old when she started on Balzac.)

Colette’s life changed permanently when, at the age of twenty, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a man then in his early thirties. Gauthier-Villars was a Parisian wit, a music and drama critic and sometime editor known to all as Willy (pronounced Vili), his favorite pen-name. A debauched Svengali with a genius for self-promotion, he presided over a “novel factory": He hatched ideas for books, gave the outlines to hacks to execute, and touched up the resulting manuscripts, to be published under his name. In such fashion—the exact details of their collaboration are still in dispute—Colette’s first book was written, with Willy credited as author. Based on Colette’s memories of Saint-Sauveur, CLAUDINE IN SCHOOL was immensely popular, initiating a series of books about the irrepressible Claudine.

In time Colette broke free from Willy and eclipsed him entirely. Writing well, it is said, is the best revenge. Herbert Lottman’s narrative of her long and extraordinarily productive life is somewhat slow-moving, but the intrinsic fascination of the story he has to tell and its exotic cast of characters will keep the reader absorbed. Above all one gets a vivid sense of Colette herself—her intensely physical appetite for life, her energy, her shrewd insight into her own emotions, which she ruthlessly mined for her autobiographical fiction. The text is supplemented by notes, an index, a list of Colette’s works, and some wonderful photographs.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXVII, December 15, 1990, p. 798.

Chicago Tribune. February 20, 1991, V, p. 3.

Kirkus Reviews. LVIII, December 15, 1990, p. 1725.

Library Journal. CXV, November 1, 1990, p. 91.

The New Republic. CCV, November 18, 1991, p. 45.

New Statesman and Society. IV, March 8, 1991, p. 33.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, February 24, 1991, p. 28.

The Observer. March 10, 1991, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly. CCLVII, December 14, 1990, p. 59.

The Times Literary Supplement. March 8, 1991, p. 10.