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Colette

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the novels and life of one of the most remarkable writers of the last century, whose Claudine series was first published under her husband's name.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French writers of the twentieth century. The novels of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 - 1954) always had women at their centre, from youth to mid-life to old age, and they were phenomenally popular, at first for their freshness and frankness about women’s lives, as in the Claudine stories, and soon for their sheer quality as she developed as a writer. Throughout her career she intrigued readers by inserting herself, or a character with her name, into her works, fictionalising her life as a way to share her insight into the human experience.

With

Diana Holmes
Professor of French at the University of Leeds

Michèle Roberts
Writer, novelist, poet and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia

And

Belinda Jack
Fellow and Tutor in French Literature and Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

51 minutes

Last on

Thu 27 Jan 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Colette (ed. Robert Phelps), The Collected Stories of Colette (Vintage Classics, 2003)

Colette, Cheri (Vintage Classics, 2001)

Colette, The Last of Cheri (Vintage Classics, 2009)

Colette, Gigi and The Cat (Vintage Classics, 2001)

Colette, Break of Day (Secker and Warburg, 1961)

Colette, My Mother's House and Sido (Random House, 1995)

Diana Holmes, Colette (Palgrave Macmillan, 1991)

Jerry Aline Flieger, Colette and the Fantom Subject of Autobiography (Cornell University Press, 1992)

Jane Gilmour, Colette's France: Her Life and Loves (Hardie Grant Books, 2013)

Julia Kristeva (trans. Jane Marie Todd), Colette (Columbia University Press, 2004)

Michele Sarde, Colette: A Biography (William Morrow & Co, 1980)

Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Bloomsbury, 2000)

Patricia A. Tilburg, Colette's Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (Berghahn Books, 2009)

Nicole Ward Jouve, Colette (Indiana University Press, 1987)


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Broadcasts

  • Thu 27 Jan 2022 09:00
  • Thu 27 Jan 2022 21:30

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