Colette

If a great writer is someone capable of creating a mythical character, then Colette was undoubtedly an immense writer, having created four: Claudine, her first heroine, whose authorship was appropriated by her husband; Sido, inspired by her own mother, undoubtedly her most beautiful creation; Gigi, her literary double, happy in love unlike her creator; and Colette herself, a French treasure and a sacred idol. In these pages, Compagnon unpacks all the facets of the writer to celebrate a pioneer of transgression and provocation who breathed into her novels a wind of freedom as unusual then as it is today. Admired by Simone de Beauvoir and more modern than Gide, Claudel, or Valéry, Colette achieved the feat of conceiving a body of work as profoundly subversive as it is universal. Reading her today is, without a doubt, to discover an eternally modern voice that invites us to embrace the 20th century in all its extravagance.