Colette

Colette began writing Break of Day in her early fifties, at Saint-Tropez on the C te d'Azur, where she had bought a small house after the breakup of her second marriage. The novel's theme--the renunciation of love and the return to an independent existence supported and enriched by the beauty and peace of nature--grows out of Colette's own period of self-assessment in the middle of her life. A collection of subtle reflections about love and life, it is among her most thoughtful and stylistically bold works.

Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealth widow.

Two volumes of Colette's most beloved works, with a new Introduction by Judith Thurman. Ch ri, together with The Last of Ch ri, is a classic story of a love affair between a very young man and a charming older woman. The amour between Fred Peloux, the beautiful gigolo known as Ch ri, and the courtesan L a de Lonval tenderly depicts the devotion that stems from desire, and is an honest account of the most human preoccupations of youth and middle age. With compassionate insight Colette paints a full-length double portrait using an impressionistic style all her own.

First published in 1920, "Cheri" is considered Colette's finest novel. It did, however, cause considerable controversy at the time, both in its choice of setting - the fabulous demi-monde of the Parisian courtesans - and in its portrayal of the exquisitely handsome, spoilt and sardonic Cheri.

Thirty-three years-old and recently divorced, Ren e N r has begun a new life on her own, supporting herself as a music-hall artist. Maxime, a rich and idle bachelor, intrudes on her independent existence and offers his love and the comforts of marriage. A provincial tour puts distance between them and enables Ren e, in a moving series of leters and meditations, to resolve alone the struggle between her need to be loved and her need to have a life and work of her own.

The stories that inspired the film Colette, directed by Wash Westmoreland and starring Keira Knightley. Colette, prodded by her first husband, Willy, began her writing career with Claudine at School, which catapulted the young author into instant, sensational success. Among the most autobiographical of Colette's works, these four novels are dominated by the child-woman Claudine, whose strength, humor, and zest for living make her seem almost a symbol for the life force. Janet Flanner described these books as "amazing writing on the almost girlish search for the absolute of happiness in physical love . . . recorded by a literary brain always wide awake on the pillow."

Widely considered the author's best work, this story of a love affair between Lea, a still-beautiful 49-year-old, and Cheri, selfish young man 30 years her junior, is a superb study of age and sexuality. While the theme of a young man who deserts his older mistress is a familiar one, Colette makes it her own.

Colette herself considered The Pure and the Impure her best book, "the nearest I shall ever come to writing an autobiography." This guided tour of the erotic netherworld with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den. It continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the strange power of desire. Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love.

The final novel of the famous Claudine series, this book is filled with the luminous insights that mark Colette's later work. Retreat from Love tells of sexuality and love in a variety of forms. Translated and with an Introduction by Margaret Crosland.