COLETTE

Sixty years after her death, the life of Colette remains a model: a model of liberty, of will, and of emancipation. Gérard Bonal, an expert who has immersed himself in her life and work, presents a biography that reads like a novel.

Colette (1873-1954) raised autobiographical fiction to an art form. In the context of contemporary lives, Colette's path was undoubtedly avant-garde. In this new biography, the author seeks to demonstrate how her life, a series of scandals and acts of dominance by sheer force, characterized by both literary and personal audacity, followed a consciously chosen path. This coherence is all the more obvious as Bonal has chosen to write this biography as a narrative—almost a novel of her life story, with its dramatic episodes, disappointed love affairs, and professional successes. By the 1920s, Colette already headed the list of celebrated authors. This is a novel in which everything is true, set in the reality of the French provinces at the turn of the century, La Belle Epoque, the First World War, the crash of 1929, the Occupation. The author has dug deep into the archives, including recently discovered and unpublished correspondence, often revealing heretofore unknown aspects of Colette's life, and the original accounts of her contemporaries. Calling upon forty years of Colettian research, Bonal has verified and cross-confirmed the often geographically scattered (in France, the United States and Australia) material, which only a devoted expert could replace in its proper perspective. With several works on Colette to his credit, Gérard Bonal enjoys a long and profound familiarity with the life and works of the writer. He founded the review Cahiers Colette in 1975 and recently directed Les Cahiers de l'Herne devoted to the novelist. He has also written documentaries and plays about her, but never before a biography.