Colette

Prize-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and memoirist Michèle Roberts tells of her experience of reading the novels of French writer Colette, whose work has inspired and encouraged her throughout her own writing life.

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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.