Colette
Personal Information
Description
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, in the Burgundy Region of France. In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a famous wit known as "Willy", who was 15 years her senior. Her first books, the Claudine series, were published under the pen name of her husband, "Willy". In 1906 she left her husband and lived for a time with the American writer and salonist Natalie Barney. The two had a short affair, and remained friends until Colette's death. She then started working in the music halls of Paris with Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf, with whom she became romantically involved. In 1907, they performed together in a pantomime entitled Rêve d'Égypte at the Moulin Rouge. Their onstage kiss nearly caused a riot, which the police were called in to suppress. As a result of this scandal, further performances of Rêve d'Égypte were banned and Colette and de Morny were no longer able to openly live together, though their relationship continued a total of five years. She was also involved with the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio during this time. In 1912 she married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin. She had one daughter. In 1914, she was asked to write a ballet for the Opéra de Paris, but the composer Maurice Ravel convinced her to rework it into an opera, L'Enfant et les sortilèges, which opened after the war in 1925. During World War I she converted her husband's estate into a hospital for the wounded. After the war, her writing career became more successful after the publication of her novel Chéri (1920). She divorced her husband after having an affair with her stepson. She married Maurice Goudeket in 1935 and changed her name to Sidonie Goudeket. Maurice Goudeket published a book about her called Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius. She published around 50 novels in total, many with autobiographical elements.
Books
Colette
Understanding fiction -- Second Edition
The Attack on the Fort Sir Tatton Sykes Captain Isaiah Sellers Lady Blessington RMS. Titanic The Man Who Would Be King The Secret Life of Walter Mitty The Lottery The Girls in Their Sunnner Dresses The Furnished Room De Mortuis The Necklace [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( A Piece of Neus I See You Never Haircut Crossing into Poland War The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky Tennessee's Partner [Araby]( The Drunkard The Lament Tickets, Please Eventide Old Red Cruel and Barbarous Treatment A Domestic Dilennna Christ in Flanders Love: Three Pages from a Sportsman's Book Love The Killers The Fly I Want to Knou Why The Adulterous Woman [A Rose for Emily]( A Good Man Is Hard to Find In the Penal Colony Through the Quinquina Glass The Bitch A Father-to-Be The Fight The Far and the Near The Sensible Thing A Christmas Memory Realpolitik The Sailor Boy's Tale Amy Foster The Killing of the Dragon Dermuche Disorder and Early Sorro•-w No Place for You, My Love 1 Write Goodbye, My Brother What Happened Noon Wine Blackberry Winter
Green wheat
"In the novella Green Wheat, fifteen-year-old Vinca and her young friend Phil struggle to comprehend their bewildering urges. Set in a season of waiting, depicting their summer vacation together in a villa in Brittany, Colette's tale probes the uncomfortable border between the grief of leaving childhood behind and the frustration of not being old enough to move beyond it." "Published in 1923, Green Wheat was initially serialized in the French newspaper Le Matin, until protests against the frank depiction of adolescent sexuality caused the paper to cease the novella's publication. Now poet and translator Zack Rogow has resurrected it with respect and care."--BOOK JACKET.
Au cinéma
Poka emmène Mine au cinéma qui accepte d'y aller avec sa peluche Sila.
Short stories
Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck
Cheri
"Cheri, together with The Last of Cheri, is a classic story of a love affair between a very young man and a charming older woman. In describing the relationship between Fred Peloux, the beautiful gigolo known as Cheri, and the courtesan Lea de Lonval, Colette tenderly depicts the devotion that stems from desire and provides an honest account of the most human preoccupations of youth and middle age. With compassionate insight she paints a full-length double portrait, using an impressionistic style all her own. In Cheri, Colette achieved a peak in her earthy, sensuous, and utterly individual art."--BOOK JACKET.
Places
Tells about different kinds of work and work places.
Pur et l'impur
"This guided tour of the erotic nether-world with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den, and continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the unlikely nature of love."--BOOK JACKET.