From the producers who brought you Carol and the studio that brought you Disobedience and the actor who brought you undisputed lesbian coming-of-age story Bend It Like Beckham comes a new film about the French writer/bisexual legend Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. But you can just call her Colette. Everyone else did and so that’s the tile of her movie.
If you know Colette, you’re surely already lined up to buy your tickets to the film. If you don’t know Colette, allow me to introduce you. She is one of the most fascinating queer women to ever have her history recorded — and boi did she ever have it recorded!
Dozens of biographers have compiled tens of thousands of pages about Colette’s life over the last few decades, each of them imprinting on her in some way or another, shaping her words and her actions into the motives that best suited their own personal agendas. In the earliest biographies after her death, Colette was painted as a victim who survived an abusive first husband and paid the price for divorcing him by being driven into stage-acting, poverty, and the arms of women. Biographers in later years, however, have “emphasized the provocative teenager, the resolute bisexual, the consummate artist” and found her to be a “surprisingly subversive modern woman who defied traditional models, was unafraid to reverse sex roles and was blessed with an amazing talent for survival and self-renewal.”
Colette is a compelling historical figure, full of fire and contradictions. Before you go see Keira Knightley portray her, here are eight things you should know about her life.
1. Colette’s first husband gave her a room of her own — and locked her inside it.
Henry Gauthier-Villars, known to everyone as Willy, was Colette’s first husband and he was an absolute con-artist. He posed as a writer, but never wrote anything at all. He hired composers to write his music critic columns and ghost writers to pen all his novels. He got free labor from Colette, and when she started wanting credit for her massively popular Claudine series and also wasn’t writing sequels fast enough, he literally locked her in her room until she produced enough pages to suit him.
2. Colette wrote the original queer YA series.
The Claudine series consists of four novels that begin when Claudine is in her early teens and follow her through her marriage to a man she ends up despising and cheating on with another woman. Claudine is unapologetically bisexual, in fact, and also a fan of wearing men’s clothes. The series was a huge hit with French housewives and French intellectuals, so much so that it spawned branded soaps, school uniforms, perfumes, and even cigars. The whole thing is just layers of queerness. Colette wrote the book posing as a man who was writing a bisexual tomboy who married a very feminine man whom she fell out of love with to pursue a very feminine woman. Many of Colette’s biographers also count Claudine as the first modern YA coming of age story with a female protagonist.
3. Claudine shares themes with Wonder Woman for a reason.
Colette’s mother was a great student of philosopher Charles Fourier and his doctrine of voluptuousness. Fourier, who is often credited with coining the word “feminism,” was a big proponent of gender equality and allowing people to explore their sexuality outside the confines of monogamous heterosexual marriage. He was very much a proponent of queer polyamory. Colette is believed to have used her mother’s journals and teachings as inspiration for her characters and her own personal ethos. Another student of Charles Fourier? Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston. You see themes of his teachings playing out vividly in many of Wonder Woman’s Golden Age stories.
In Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, she says Colette was “a young woman with a weakness for bondage an old woman with a genius for domination.” That’s Wonder Woman’s history in a nutshell, but literally.
4. Proust was Colette’s arch-nemesis.
Despite being a prolific writer who turned out more than 50 novels in her life, Colette was often denied the critical respect she deserved because she wrote about women and also feelings and sex and sexuality and fashion and food and the elusiveness of the concept of home. Oh, and animals. Lots of talking animals. Nearly every biography and even obituary of Colette will mention that she was the best French woman writer of her time; more often than not she is “second only to Proust.” There’s no evidence she had any personal enmity toward Proust, but critics could not help stop comparing them to each other and finding Colette wanting simply by the “feminine” nature of her writing. Rarely, and wonderfully, major publications did single her out as the greatest French writer of her generation. Famously, the New York Times did so in it’s review of her collection of short stories in 1951:
“She is the greatest living French writer of fiction [and] she was while Gide and Proust still lived,” NYT declared. “These two preposterously afflicted self-adoring, frankly career-geniuses certainly got in Colette’s light; they certainly diminished her standing, though not her own kind of genius.”
5. Colette’s chart puts Alice Pieszecki’s to shame.
In addition to writing about bisexual women, Colette lived openly as a bisexual woman and had relationships with many prominent queer ladies. Her two most famous women lovers are probably American playwright and novelist Natalie Clifford Barney, self-proclaimed “queen of the Paris lesbians” and French noblewoman and artist Mathilde “Missy” de Morny (who also happened to be Napoleon’s niece). Missy was famous for her short hair, the fact that she wore full three-piece suits (despite the fact that it was literally illegal for women to do so) and her marriage to openly gay nobleman Jacques Godart. She even crossed paths and lovers with famous English suffragette/original Shane McCutcheon, Radclyffe Hall.
6. Her queer kisses caused literal riots.
When Colette and Missy kissed on stage after performing Rêve d’Égypte at the Moulin Rouge in 1907, the police were called in to control the crowd, which responded to the sapphic smooch with puritanical hysterics. Their riot spilled into the streets and ended with people smashing windows. This followed an incident where Colette was photographed on stage after her breast slipped out of one of her costumes and exposed her nipple. The public was so frenzied about her behavior, she and Missy had to stop living together (though they continued their relationship for several more years).
7. Colette made Audrey Hepburn.
Colette wrote until her dying day. In fact, one of her last works, Gigi, is probably her most famous — at least among Americans. She published it in her 70s and then hand-picked Audrey Hepburn to play the title role in the Broadway show. A role that launched Hepburn’s career, despite the fact that she couldn’t even pitch her voice so the audience could hear her when she first started rehearsing. The show’s producers and directors were worried about Hepburn’s timidity and the way she “garbled” her lines, but she always had Colette in her corner.
8. Colette did not want to be a hero.
Colette was not without her glaring flaws and weaknesses, none of which she shied away from talking and writing about. She seemed to — at the very least — not care for her own daughter, ultimately abandoning her to paid caretakers. She wrote of being a mother, “My strain of virility saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevated to a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocre author.” She also confessed that a friend had to tear a horse whip out of her hand when she took it up to hit her child with it. It’s no surprise, then, that the most unflattering biography of Colette comes from Michel del Castillo, one of Colette’s daughter’s longtime friends. Colette also published stories and columns in newspapers and magazines that ran anti-Semitic content during the Nazi occupation of France, despite also helping her Jewish friends and being married to a Jewish man.
It’s impossible to try to recount all the ins and outs and ups and downs of Colette’s life in one list. The most recent biographies about her life contain multiple volumes. But these are some things I thought you’d want to know! If you’ve got any Colette anecdotes or facts you want to talk about, share them in the comments. In the meantime, here’s the official trailer for Keira Knightley’s film. You know a review is coming as soon as I get my hands on it.
The whole child abuse deal should definitely be enough to condemn her as a horrible person lol
Thanks for this! I saw the trailer last week and hoped it’d be covered on AS. I’ve read exactly one Colette short story and had NO IDEA.
I don’t know yet, how I’m supposed to be able deal with Keira Knightley in that role.
It‘s probably going to be smelling salts instead of popcorn for me at the movie theater.
You could try the smelling salts ON the popcorn?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Keira Knightley is my root and it’s like the filmmakers saw directly into my little gay brain and decided to give me everything I’ve always wanted *_* the costume design alone might kill me.
I know, right?
The cover image is like the bisexual Hogwarts Professor fanfic I never knew I needed in my life.
9. Colette was a woman of color – and of size, for that matter.
Make of Knightley’s casting what you will.
Wait, was she really a woman of color?
In terms of being a “woman of size,” in her youth and early middle ages she was quite thin and then whatever “average size” means; in her late middle ages and later years she did unapologetically gain weight, for sure, and wrote often about the joys of food and how she preferred her women not too thin!
Colette’s great-grandfather was referred to as a “mulatto”, and her grandfather was described as dark skinned. I haven’t seen anything to indicate whether her or her mother were considered anything other than white.
I read that Colette’s great-great-grandmother was black – she came from Martinique. Thus Sido, Colette’s mother, was one-eighth black. Sido referred to her father by a racist nickname and was upset to have African features. Colette herself kept her hair frizzy and referred to her African ancestry to friends and in her works (La Maison de Claudine for one), but then referred to her Haitian sister-in-law as ‘not like us’ because of her race.Judith Thurman notes that her journalism about Harlem is enthusiastic but full of racial cliches – so is her journalism on Uruguyans and Josephine Baker. Colette was friends with the Haitian (and probably bisexual) poet Ida Faubert and had an affair and long friendship with Josephine Baker – it would be interesting to know if they discussed these issues. So Colette as probably seen as white by those who didn’t known that she had a small amount of African heritage, and her attitude to that heritage is deeply ambiguous.
Here is why I love Colette so much: when I was a child, my mother gave me the Claudine series as a gift. This was 2002 in mostly rural France and I did not know women could want, let alone love, each other. And listen: these books are -as Heather said- essentially a celebration of queer desire. Colette is in love with her teaching assistant, who breaks her heart because she begins a relationship with the school’s main teacher (also a woman, because of course she is). Afterwards, she meets Luce, the TA’s little sister, and together they begin playing a game that strongly reminds me of the last sex survey Autostraddle asked us to fill in. And that, you guys, takes place in the first book out of FOUR.
At the time, Colette’s writing wasn’t enough for me to realize I was a lesbian. Still, I can remember how delighted I felt while reading Claudine, who never once questions why she wants girls. She just does.
I love the Claudines for that reason too! The Pure and the Impure has some good bits on lesbianism, but my favourite is her story/sketch ‘Sleepless Nights’ in the Tendrils of the Vine collection. It’s dedicated to Missy and about their relationship. She wrote 2 other stories for and about Missy (Grey Day and The Last Fire), also in The Tendrils of the Vine. In 1996, the livre de poche edition was censoring Sleepless Nights by changing the grammar to make the narrator’s lover a man- hopefully they’ve don’t still do that!
I just looked her up after reading this article and the wikipedia is terrible. There’s a whole paragraph that I’m just going to quote because it is so infuriating:
“Willy, fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, introduced Colette into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while engaging in sexual affairs and encouraging her own lesbian alliances. It was he who chose the titillating subject-matter of the Claudine novels, “the secondary myth of Sappho… the girls’ school or convent ruled by a seductive female teacher” (Ladimer, p. 53). Colette later said that she would never have become a writer if it had not been for Willy.[7][8]”
Then after it talks about her not getting paid for the Claudine novels with no mention of the fact that it was because her husband was stealing from her, just overall no mention of how he just exploited her their entire relationship and the effect that had on her career. It also highlights that her legacy is as an important voice in women’s writing, again separating her from “great” literature, aka written by straight cis het white guys.
I contribute to Wikipedia, and if Heather can give us the sources of where it’s mentioned that Willy got paid for Claudine instead of Colette, I would be really glad to edit the article so I can improve it at least marginally!
it’s on her page in encyclopedia britannica
It is still widely quoted that Willy locked her in her room to make her write, but Judith Thurman discredits this story. She also writes that Willy probably did play a big part in Colette’s becoming a writer, but that Colette’s denial of having wanted to write before is unconvincing. Willy did steal money and credit from her and was certainly abusive.
On Colette being women’s writing and not great literature I would argue that she is both – because of course a woman writing mainly about women can be great literature – though she does also write well about men. She is an important female voice, a pioneering author writing from her own female experience about women desiring other women and younger men, women working and wanting indepedence,aging, the lives of courtesans, abusive relationships, motherhood and love as not the be-all-and-end-all of a woman’s life. Her story collection Bella-Vista has one story about abortion and another about incestuous abuse. She is also one of the masters of French prose style,a great nature writer, and Mauriac thought she should have got his Nobel prize – she was nominated.
I don’t know yet,but as a bisexual, I need more support and love, thsnkd for your post.
*Jenny Owen-Youngs voice* Wowwww. WOW! Wow. Wow.
I am flabbergasted with delight. How did I never know about this person before? I had no idea she existed. Heather, thank you for bringing us all this extremely important information. I am in awe.
Great article! But Thurman, the best biographer, says that Willy did write some music criticism and novels (the latter awful – mainly about older men and teenage girls – his real life crimes) and that he was essentially a pioneer impresario. The fact he had talent at something, does not negate that personally he was horrible. Unfortunately, the locking-up story- which Thurman discredits- takes attention from Willy’s far worse acts that actually happened – he said he’d known Colette since she was ten! He had affairs with Meg Villars – his wife after Colette- and the film star Musidora when they were teenagers (and Colette mentions other affairs with minors). He probably raped Colette before their marriage and gave her venereal disease during it. He stole the Claudines’ credit and money from her, and the resultant money troubles persisted for much of her life. He did help her a lot in becoming a writer , but this is obviously negated by his awful behaviour. When Colette began an affair with Georgie Raoul-Duval, so did he! He then wrote a vicious novel about her (he wanted to call it Sidone or The Perverted Peasant, but it ended up The Imprudences of Peggy). Colette also said he forced her to entertain and have threesomes with his mistresses – although Thurman points out that Colette had affairs with several of his mistresses because she was attracted to them, and also to get back at Willy.