Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known simply as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy. Her parents were war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905) and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), née Landoy (1835–1912). Jules-Joseph Colette was a Zouave of the Saint-Cyr military school. A war hero who had lost a leg in the Second Italian War of Independence, he was awarded a post as tax collector in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye where his children were born. 

Colette was the youngest of four children. She had three older siblings: an older maternal half-sister, Héloïse (1860–1908), an older maternal half-brother, Edmé (1863–1913), and a full older brother, Léopold (1866–?). Colette attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17. The family was initially well off, but poor financial management substantially reduced their income.

In 1920, Colette published Chéri, portraying love between an older woman and a much younger man. Chéri is the lover of Léa, a wealthy courtesan; Léa is devastated when Chéri marries a girl his own age and delighted when he returns to her, but after one final night together, she sends him away again.

Colette's marriage to Jouvenel ended in divorce in 1924, due partly to his infidelities and partly to her affair with her 16-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. In 1925, she met Maurice Goudeket, who became her final husband; the couple stayed together until her death.

Colette was by then an established writer (The Vagabond had received three votes for the prestigious Prix Goncourt). The decades of the 1920s and 1930s were her most productive and innovative period. Set mostly in Burgundy or Paris during the Belle Époque, her work focused on married life and sexuality. It was frequently quasi-autobiographical: Chéri (1920) and Le Blé en Herbe (1923) both deal with love between an aging woman and a very young man, a situation reflecting her relationship with Bertrand de Jouvenel and with her third husband, Goudeket, who was 16 years her junior. 

La Naissance du Jour (1928) is her explicit criticism of the conventional lives of women, expressed in meditation on age and the renunciation of love by the character of her mother, Sido. By this time Colette was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. "It... has no plot, and yet tells of three lives all that should be known", wrote Janet Flanner of Sido (1929). 

"Once again, and at greater length than usual, she has been hailed for her genius, humanities and perfect prose by those literary journals which years ago... lifted nothing at all in her direction except the finger of scorn." During the 1920s she was associated with the Jewish-Algerian writer Elissa Rhaïs, who adopted a Muslim persona in order to market her novels.