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The Provocative, Audacious, sometimes scandalous Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was one of the century's great writers and, as we learn from Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier in their exhaustively researched biography, her finest creation may have been herself -- or her many selves, for throughout her life Colette would recreate herself again and again. In this first of two volumes, the authors return to the rural village of Colette's childhood, the place she would later shape into her Claudine novels, to shed new light on her crucial relationship with her mother, Sido. Far from being the penniless orphan or the wise Burgundian housewife variously described in Colette's writings, Sido was herself a passionate sensualist with a philosophy of life and style of living that would powerfully influence her talented daughter.Included in this volume is her turbulent marriage to Henry Gauthier Villars when the then 21-year old ingenue was embraced by the Paris avant-garde, her scandal-filled career as a nude dancer, and the wild years when she was lavishly kept by the emperor's niece, the Marquise de Morny, and became the darling of Paris Lesbos. Her tumultuous life and her complex, often ambiguous works are fully reexamined in this definitive two-part biography, and as the authors painstakingly dismantle each of the many myths that have surrounded Colette, the woman who emerges appears an even greater writer, and one of the most original thinkers of our time.… (more)