Gigi and The Cat by Colette

Gigi and The Cat by Colette

A girl is taught how to become desirable. A young wife discovers that marriage may not make her beloved.

Colette’s paired novellas ask what happens when love refuses to follow the rules.

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major film Colette.

GIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITE

In turn-of-the-century Paris, Gigi is being educated for the life of a future courtesan. Her days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions, but she remains bored by what she is taught and unconvinced by the destiny planned for her. When the wealthy Gaston begins to see her differently, Gigi surprises everyone with her own approach to love.

This edition also includes The Cat, a sharply observed novella about a young marriage undone by jealousy, possessiveness and a husband’s attachment to his beloved cat.

Together, Gigi and The Cat show Colette’s brilliance as a writer of intimacy, social performance and self-possession. These classic French novellas are elegant, sensuous and psychologically acute, ideal for readers of women’s classics and literary fiction about love, marriage and independence.

Colette is a kind of corsetiere of loveThis most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving -- Anatole Broyard * New York Times *
Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur * The Times *
Sumptuous * Time *
A perfectionist in her every word * Spectator *
Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France * New York Times *

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy on 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she moved to Paris with her first husband, the notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthiers-Viller (Willy). By locking her in her room, Willy forced Collette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. Colettte left Willy in 1906 and worked in music-halls as an actor and dancer. She had a love affair with Napoleon’s niece, married twice more, had a baby at 40 and at 47. Her writing, which included novels, portraits, essays and a large body of autobiographical prose, was admired by Proust and Gide. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died, aged 81, she was given a state funeral and buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780099422754
ISBN 10	0099422751
Title	Gigi and The Cat
Author	Colette
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2001-10-04
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.