Volume 47, Number 2 · February 10, 2000
La Vagabonde
By Allan Massie
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
by Judith Thurman
Knopf, 592 pp., $30.00
Creating Colette Volume I: From Ingenue to Libertine, 1873-1913
by Claude Francis, by Fernande Gontier
Steerforth, 367 pp., $32.00
Creating Colette Volume II: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912-1954
by Claude Francis, by Fernande Gontier
Steerforth, 298 pp., $27.00
There are writers whose essence may be suggested by a single phrase or sentence from their work—Kipling, Hemingway, Eliot for instance. Colette (1873-1934) is another such writer. 'Ces plaisirs qu'on nomme, à la légère, physiques'—'these pleasures lightly called physical.' The sentence appears first in her novel of adolescent love, Le Blé en herbe (The Ripening Seed). She took it again as the original title of her study of lesbian affections, Le Pur et l'impur, which, she suggested, mistakenly, 'will one day be recognized perhaps as my best book.' I say 'mistakenly,' for I do not think it her best book, though it may be her most significant.
Review, 4805 words
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