Free And Wild Words: Colette on the Obsessive Joys of Writing By Hand
“There is a tired spirit deep inside of me that still continues its gourmet’s quest for a better word, and then for a better one still.”
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954), or more famously known as Colette, was widely acclaimed during the 1920s to be France’s “greatest woman writer.”
In 1948, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, losing to T.S. Eliot. Colette is perhaps most well-known for her novella Gigi published in 1944.
But there’s another book I recently discovered, thanks to the research of the always illuminating Maria Popova, a now out-of-print 1975 edition of Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography of Colette Drawn from Her Lifetime Writings.
Popova writes that, as “A queer woman amid the conservative and bigoted culture of the early twentieth century, [Colette] tirelessly championed women’s sexual liberation through her art.”
This is probably no more evident than in the Moulin Rouge incident of 1907, recounted in the book Women of the Left Bank…
