![]() ![]() And she made of her life a project just as fascinating as her books. Her books were simultaneously popular and acclaimed – read by critics and the public alike – not to mention scandalous. ![]() She was a pioneer of the French school of autofiction (autobiographical fiction), writing about women's lives in ways that broke new ground. ![]() The story of Colette and her work is one of the most astonishing in modern literature. "Love, the bread and butter of my pen," she wrote, though she put it more bluntly in her book The Pure and the Impure (1932): "The flesh, always the flesh, the mysteries and betrayals and frustrations and surprises of the flesh." André Gide, that great connection point for 20th-Century French literature, agreed, praising Chéri for its "intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh". Her work – mostly at novella length, short and sharp – survives because her chief subject is one that never goes out of fashion. ![]()
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