Acknowledment gigi 19582/28/2024 Claudine became what Colette's biographer Judith Thurman called "the century's first teenager", with her sponge-like absorption of adult behaviour, and in the books we see the development of Colette's mastery of sensuous description, as well as her first ransackings of her own life for material (which can make reading the wedding night scene in Claudine Married a somewhat voyeuristic experience). The books are apprentice work by definition – Colette wrote them in her twenties, under duress – but for a writer who started reading Balzac at the age of seven, that is no criticism. Once she wrote them – at times locked in a room to spur her to completion – and they were garnished with a few editorial suggestions by Willy ("Some girlish high jinks… you see what I mean?"), Willy had them published under his own name and kept the copyright and royalties. Her first four books were the chronicles of fictional French schoolgirl Claudine – Claudine at School (1900), Claudine in Paris (1901), Claudine Married (1902) and Claudine and Annie (1903) – which she wrote at the behest of her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villars, a journalist and editor known by the less elegant pen-name of Willy. But to understand her – her fertile productivity, her showiness, her expertise in the mysteries of the human heart, and her appetite for including herself in her books, disguised either lightly or not at all – we must first understand that she almost didn’t become famous in the first place. And she made of her life a project just as fascinating as her books. Her books were simultaneously popular and acclaimed – read by critics and the public alike – not to mention scandalous. She was a pioneer of the French school of autofiction (autobiographical fiction), writing about women's lives in ways that broke new ground. The story of Colette and her work is one of the most astonishing in modern literature. "Love, the bread and butter of my pen," she wrote, though she put it more bluntly in her book The Pure and the Impure (1932): "The flesh, always the flesh, the mysteries and betrayals and frustrations and surprises of the flesh." André Gide, that great connection point for 20th-Century French literature, agreed, praising Chéri for its "intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh". Her work – mostly at novella length, short and sharp – survives because her chief subject is one that never goes out of fashion.
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