Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Colette
-
Standard Name: Colette
Birth Name: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Married Name: Sidonie-Gabrielle Gauthier-Villars
Married Name: Sidonie-Gabrielle de Jouvenel
Married Name: Sidonie-Gabrielle Goudeket
Pseudonym: Willy
Pseudonym: Colette
Pseudonym: Colette Willy
Colette
, a Frenchwoman whose career began with the twentieth century, wrote nearly eighty volumes of fiction (often depicting lesbian or other scandalous sexuality), as well as journalism, memoirs (she is a great self-fashioner), and plays. Only a fraction is commented on here. Eight various collections of her letters have been printed, and many more remain unpublished. Her favourite topics are love, sensuality, and people's jockeying for power in relationships; she is a pioneer in the representation of female desire.
Castle, Terry. “Yes you, sweetheart”. London Review of Books, pp. 3-8.
In a letter to Gertrude Stein
written in December 1926, NCB
explains: The other night . . . I realized how little the French femmes de lettres know of English and Americans and vice versa...
STW
's biographer Claire Harman
terms this story extraordinarily delicate . . . at once both worldly and lyrical, reminiscent of Colette
, whose writing Sylvia admired.
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus.
62-3
Literary responses
Michèle Roberts
MR
thought the reviews of this first book wonderful,
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
153
because [y]ou couldn't have asked for a richer range.
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
160
That range, however, spanned male voices complaining of shrieking Lesbian banshees
Kenyon, Olga. Women Writers Talk. Interviews with 10 women writers. Lennard Publishing.
Robert Galbraith has his own website, which details his military background and his work first for the military police and then in private security. He says his flamboyant, unusual mother came from Cornwall and went...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michèle Roberts
The title story uses mud or muddy almost thirty times. MR
writes, as always, as a feminist; these stories occupy a borderline between the self-making of women and their appropriation into patriarchal stories. She enjoys...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michèle Roberts
The French side of MR
's heritage includes influence from George Sand
and Colette
.
Newman, Jenny. “Michèle Roberts”. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, edited by Sharon Monteith et al., Arnold, pp. 119-34.
119
In a recent interview she stresses the intimate connection, in her view, between memory and creativity, and the fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Bowen
The authors whom EB
wrote of for the British Council in English Novelists are (as the commission required) canonical and mostly male. She was deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf
, and wrote after Woolf's death...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Intertextuality and Influence
Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryher
After the Second World War, and Influenced by her varied studies (of Shakespeare
, Mallarmé
, Colette
, and of Persia) as well as by her perceptions of contemporary European warfare, Bryher wrote...
Friends, Associates
Una Troubridge
In the wake of Hall's death, UT
found some strength from her friendships with women, such as the writers Colette
and Natalie Barney
.
Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. John Murray.
