Born: 28 January 1873, France
Died: 3 August 1954
Country most active: France
Also known as: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Writer, performer and journalist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi. Her first four novels, the popular and semi-autobiographical Claudine stories: Claudine à l’école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s’en va (1903) – were originally published under her husband’s pen name. A controlling man 14 years her senior, he was known to lock her in a room until she produced more work, and they separated in 1906. Because her husband held the copyright, Colette received no money from her bestselling books. She was able to support herself – barely – with a life on stage, scraping by and later publishing the semi-autobiographical novel La Vagabonde in 1910.
During this time, she also had relationships with other women, including poet, playwright and novelist Natalie Clifford Barney and Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf (who dressed in men’s attire and went by Max). An onstage kiss between the two on 3 January 1907 nearly caused a riot.
In 1912, Colette married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin, and had a daughter in 1913. During World War I, Colette delved into journalism and photography.
She later published Chéri (1920) and Le Blé en Herbe (1923), both love stories between an older woman and a much younger man.
Colette and Jouvenel divorced in 1924, due a combination of his infidelities and her affair with her 16-year-old stepson. In 1925 she met Maurice Goudeket; the couple married and stayed together until her death.
The 1920s and 1930s were her most productive and innovative period, writing about married life and sexuality. La Naissance du Jour (1928) explicitly criticises the conventional lives of women. By this time Colette was commonly considered France’s greatest woman writer.
Colette was 67 when the Germans invaded and occupied France, and she remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais Royal. Her husband, who was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released in 1942, Colette lived through the rest of the war years with the anxiety of a possible second arrest. During this time, she produced two volumes of memoirs, Journal à Rebours (1941) and De ma Fenêtre (1942). She wrote articles for several pro-Nazi newspapers and her novel Julie de Carneilhan (1941) contains many anti-Semitic slurs,
In 1944, Colette published what became perhaps her most famous work, Gigi, which tells the story of 16-year-old Gigi, who is trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover but defies the tradition by marrying him instead. In 1949 it was made into a French film, then adapted for the stage in 1951 with the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn – picked by Colette personally – in the title role. The 1958 Hollywood musical movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
In the postwar years, Colette was a famous public figure, crippled by arthritis and cared for by Goudeket, who supervised the preparation of her Oeuvres Complètes (1948 – 1950). She continued to write, publishing L’Etoile Vesper (1944) and Le Fanal Bleu (1949), in which she contemplated the problems of a writer whose inspiration is primarily autobiographical.
When she died in 1954 she was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic Church due to her divorces, but was given a state funeral, the first French woman of letters to be granted the honour, and interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery.