Colette: My Literary Mother

by Michèle Roberts

The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling.

Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes.

In this book, Michèle Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love. Delving into four keys texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures.

Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.

Genres: Biography

160 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2024

About the author

Michèle Brigitte Roberts is the author of fifteen novels, including Ignorance which was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction and Daughters of the House which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Half-English and half-French, Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Reviews

[Nicholas Perez]

So glad to see Michèle Roberts writing again.

[Athena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went through a phase of reading Colette in college (because of course I did), but I don't think I read any of the works discussed here.

Roberts' disection of four pieces she chose to read and reread leads to a world of discoveries about the meaning behind Colette's words. Mothers, fairy tales, and incest are all themes which pop up.

It definitely made me want to pick up Colette again and I wonder how she will strike me now that many years have passed. Roberts walks a fine line of possibly reading too much into things. It's the age-old complaint against English teachers: how do we KNOW the author meant the blue vase symbolizes her great aunt's dead parakeet? But overall it's interesting to hear one author speak about another, especially one in whom they've long had special interest.

The narrator of the audiobook has a girlish voice I found trying and artificial.

Thank you to NetGalley for my audio ARC.

[Jane Fudger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is allegedly a literary memoir of the French authoress, Colette. Unfortunately I found thwe work disappointing -the book is only 120 pages long, [excluding an introduction which was more an autobiography of the writer plus the bibliography at the end]
The so called memoir concentrated on one novel, Claudine At Home, and how the book related to Colette's life as influenced by her mother Sido. To me it is not worth the effort to read If you are looking for a biography to learn about Colette, her life and works as I did I would look elsewhere.

[AL · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued as I’ve heard much of Colette over the years, mostly revolving around Gigi. I was disappointed in this telling of her, her work. I wouldn’t say it was bad writing, just not personally interesting to me and more the author’s opinion of Colette and her work than telling about Colette. On the plus side, I am dying to read more biographical material of this intriguing woman and to read more of her own work!