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 Eight various collections of her letters have been printed, and many more remain unpublished.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.
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...
Textual Production
Penelope Mortimer
Besides reviewing television, PM
wrote both plays and screenplays for the small screen. She adapted for television both Colette
's Ripening Seed (a novel, translated into English by Roger Senhouse
, about a teenage boy's...
Textual Production
Deborah Levy
DL
has also written dramatic adaptations for BBC
radio of others' work: of Chance Acquaintances by Colette
, of Unless by Carol Shields
, and of Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca
, the last...
Textual Production
Julia Kristeva
JK
issued in three successive volumes what she calls a triptych: Le génie féminin: La Vie, la folie, les mots: Hannah Arendt
, Melanie Klein
, Colette.
Kristeva, Julia. “Is There a Feminine Genius?”. Critical Inquiry, Vol.
30
, No. 3, pp. 493-04.
493 and n1
Reception
Susan Hill
This novel won the Whitbread Literary Award for fiction for 1972.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
14
Critic Michele Murray
called it a thoroughly created piece of work . . . wrought of language, built not from any personal experience,...
EF
wrote introductions to Maria Edgeworth
's Belinda and Patronage for the Pandora Press
's Mothers of the Novel series, both publiahed in 1986. She also contributed an article to Colette, 1991, a volume...
Fictionalization
Lady Eleanor Butler
Among many less formal honours during the ladies' lifetimes, the most extraordinary was LEB
's award of a French, ancien régime, military medal: the Croix St Louis. It is shown in a famous portrait of...
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...
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
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
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Simone de Beauvoir
SB
's feeling of unalterable security as a small child came from her nursemaid, Louise, who existed, as I thought, only in order to watch over my sister and myself.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translator Kirkup, James, Penguin.