Secrets
of the Flesh : A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
The same keen yet
affectionate gaze Judith Thurman trained on Isak Dinesen in her
1983 National Book Award winner, The
Life of a Storyteller, 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 Chéri.
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
The
Vagabond by Colette, Enid
McLeod, Raymond Mortimer (Introduction)
Thirty-three years old and recently divorced,
Renée Néré has begun a new life on her own, supporting herself
as a music-hall artist. Maxime, a rich and idle bachelor, intrudes
on her independent existence and offers his love and the comforts
of marriage. A provincial tour puts distance between them and
enables Renée, in a moving series of letters and meditations, to
resolve alone the struggle between her need to be loved and her
need to have a life and work of her own.
Colette,
Beauvoir and Duras : Age and Women Writers by Bethany
Ladimer
In a pioneering study
of the three best-known French women writers of the twentieth
century, Bethany Ladimer examines the ways in which the aging
process shaped their creativity and their lives. Simone de
Beauvoir, Colette, and Marguerite Duras all lived long lives and
were prolific writers until the end. Ladimer's developmental
approach to their creativity takes into account literary analysis
and also discusses their work and lives from the standpoint of
history and the social sciences, a conjunction that considers age,
gender, and a culture that depends on the ideas of sexual
difference for its national identity. She incorporates the work of
Betty Friedan, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Margaret Gulette, among
others, into her study.
