Product Description

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was this century's first modern woman. She arrived in Paris around 1900 as the provincial child bride of a notorious rake and brilliant literary impressario, Willy, who signed her first novels, the Claudines, as his own. They invented the erotically reckless teenage girl as we know her, and became the greatest French bestsellers of all time. When this tumultuous marriage ended, Colette went off with a high-born woman lover, the virile Marquise de Belboeuf, and embarked on a flamboyant stage career. She bared her breast to raucous applause in the French music-hall and became a celebrity of the lesbian demimonde. Until her death in 1954, she continued to rewrite the rules for loving, working, and aging. At the end of the century, her life and work still have the power to challenge the norms.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93143 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The same keen yet affectionate gaze Judith Thurman trained on Isak Dinesen in her 1983 National Book Award winner, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen distinguishes her robust portrait of the great French writer Colette. In Secrets of the Flesh, Thurman shrewdly disentangles fact from legend during the course of the writer's long and turbulent life (1873-1954), yet she doesn't question Colette's right to mythologise herself. The fictions Colette created about herself were part of a lifelong attempt to make sense, not just of her own experience, but of the "secrets of the flesh" (André Gide's phrase in an admiring letter), the bonds that link women to men, parents to children, in an eternal search for love that is also a struggle for dominance. Chronicling Colette's scandalous life--male and female lovers, a stint in vaudeville, an affair with her stepson, a final happy marriage to a younger man--Thurman makes it clear that the writer's adored yet dominating mother and exploitative first husband made it difficult for her to conceive of amorous equality. Yet she nonetheless created a satisfying, creative existence, firmly rooted in the senses and filled with artistic achievement, from the bestselling The Claudine Novels to the mature insights of The Vagabond and Cheri. Thurman assesses with equal acuity the bleakness of Colette's world-view and a zest for life that it never seemed to dampen. --Wendy Smith

Amazon.co.uk Review
The same keen yet affectionate gaze Judith Thurman trained on Isak Dinesen in her 1983 National Book Award winner, Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen distinguishes her robust portrait of the great French writer Colette. In Secrets of the Flesh, Thurman shrewdly disentangles fact from legend during the course of the writer's long and turbulent life (1873-1954), yet she doesn't question Colette's right to mythologize herself. The fictions Colette created about herself were part of a lifelong attempt to make sense, not just of her own experience, but of the "secrets of the flesh" (André Gide's phrase in an admiring letter), the bonds that link women to men, parents to children, in an eternal search for love that is also a struggle for dominance. Chronicling Colette's scandalous life--male and female lovers, a stint in vaudeville, an affair with her stepson, a final happy marriage to a younger man--Thurman makes it clear that the writer's adored yet dominating mother and exploitative first husband made it difficult for her to conceive of amorous equality. Yet she nonetheless created a satisfying, creative existence, firmly rooted in the senses and filled with artistic achievement, from the bestselling Claudine novels to the mature insights of The Vagabond and Cheri. Thurman assesses with equal acuity the bleakness of Colette's world-view and a zest for life that it never seemed to dampen. --Wendy Smith

About the Author
Judith Thurman is the author of ISAK DINESEN: THE LIFE OF A STORYTELLER, which won the National Book Award for Biography in 1983. It formed the basis for Sydney Pollack's film OUT OF AFRICA, on which she was Associate Producer. Her essays on literature, film, culture and style have also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, Elle, Vogue and the Sunday Times. She lives in Manhattan.

Customer Reviews

An excellent writer examined by an equally excellent writer
You may think Colette would be a gift for anyone to write about - how could you go wrong with detailing such a colourful life - but Thurman proves theres a world of difference between merely charting or interpreting someone's life and the 'art' of biography.

And this is an excellent piece of work. If you find when you walk into bookstores, you despair at the piles of gaudily-covered repetitive works of fiction, this book will restore your confidence in literature. If you find you can devour a book in a day, this work will take you at least a week to consume - and it'll actually make you think in the process.

And you'll enjoy it.

Riveting portrait of an artist and an age
This book is so well written! Not only has Judith Thurman come to a truly thoughtful and sensitive point of view on Colette and her works, but also managed to see and portray her in the context of the fascinating society and the time in which she lived (late 19th to mid 20th centuries). There are so many interesting characters passing through the pages of this book, not to mention historical events.

I have been a long-time fan of Colette's work, and this biography has deepened my appreciation of her books as well as given me much food for thought on the subjects of artists, 'rebels', and the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives to make them more interesting. I generally disapprove of authors biographies becuase so often they serve only to diminish an artist and her/his work. This time however the author, Judith Thurman has managed to enhance the writer and her work without in any way writing a hagiography. I particularly liked the sensitivity with which Thurman advanced her own criticisms or doubts about Colette's behaviour without ever giving herself the final word. Like any truly great biographer she allows her subject to have the final word and be the final authority on herself, leaving the reader better able to draw their own conclusions.

A Biography Worthy Of The Subject
A refreshingly honest and candid look at Colette, which I quickly devoured. The Colette here is a woman absolutely unconcerned with exterior politics and interested only in human, specifically female relationships, displaying an artist's narcissism on the effect her own relationships had on the people around her. The author pares away a lot of Colette's self-mythologizing and tries to get beyond the veil of self-absorption her subject erects, but at the same time eschews the opportunity to judge Colette. This was a large, well-referenced tome but nevertheless an enthralling read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Colette or her work. Definitely the best biography I read this year.