Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle (1873-1954)

French writer. Her best novels reveal an exquisite sensitivity, largely centred on the joys and sorrows of love, and include Chéri (1920), La Fin de Chéri/The End of Chéri (1926), and Gigi (1944).

She wrote with realism, sharp observation, wit, and style, and had a sensuous awareness of nature, particularly animals, as remembered from her childhood in the countryside.

At the age of 20 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a journalist known as ‘Willy’, under whose name and direction her first four novels, featuring a heroine named Claudine and based on her own early life, were written 1900-03. Divorced 1906, she worked in music-halls as a striptease and mime artist for a while, but continued to write.

Other works include La Vagabonde/The Vagabond (1910), L'Entrave/The Shackle (1914), Le Blé en herbe/The Tender Shoot (1923), La Chatte/The Cat (1933), L'Etoile vesper/The Evening Star (1947), and Le Fanal bleu/The Blue Lantern (1949). She also wrote short stories, essays, plays, and the libretto for Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges/The Child and the Spells (1925).