To help solve her family’s financial troubles, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, a writer 14 years her senior better known by the pen name Willy. The change in venue wasn’t entirely her choice.

In 1893, Colette moved to Paris, where she would eventually form a freer, more androgynous identity. Tilburg adds, “ literature from the first decade of the 20th century spoke to that new generation of French women.” Comparatively, most of the writer’s literary contemporaries attended private Catholic schools. Raised by a mother on whom she was overly dependent and a father she felt she never truly knew, Colette attended “a secular public school as part of the first generation of girls formed by the secular instructional revolution of the 1870s,” says Patricia Tilburg, a historian at Davidson College and the author of Colette’s Republic: Work, Gender and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914. “Her aggressive strength was used in describing the varying tensions in personal relationships, evoking the material world as she saw it, adding the descant of her memory, perfecting an instrument of style, resisting any attempt to make moral judgments.”īorn in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy on January 28, 1873, Colette spent much of her early life close to home. “Unlike many other women writers in all countries, she never campaigned, never attacked or defended any cause of public interest,” wrote biographer Margaret Crosland in 1973. Known for her depictions of female sexuality and astute yet lighthearted social commentary on the everyday lives of young women, Colette was a figure ahead of her time. She published more than 30 books, reported on the front lines of World War I, received a Nobel Prize nomination and served as the first woman president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt literary organization. The writer at the center of this scandal-a woman who used the patronymic Colette to command respect-was a trailblazer of French literature. The cause of this unrest: an onstage kiss between French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her lover Mathilde de Morny, an aristocrat otherwise known as “Missy.” Opening night proved to be the only performance of Egyptian Dream, as police promptly shut the production down.Ĭolette in costume for Egyptian Dream Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Walking past the Moulin Rouge on the evening of January 3, 1907, passers-by encountered riots bleeding onto the streets of Paris.

Sidonie gabrielle colette chéri