Claudine Married

(Paperback)

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The third book in the Claudine series which became a cultural phenomenon in early 20th century France - featured in the new, acclaimed film COLETTE, starring Keira Knightley, out Jan 2019. THE STORIES THAT INSPIRED THE FILM COLETTE, out Jan 2019. The third book in Colette's enchanting Claudine series. Following the excitement of a shared life in Paris, Claudine's marriage to Renaud has settled into a stale pattern of bickering conversations and mutual inattention. Just as Claudine begins to fear herself confined to a stifled existence, a chance meeting with a friend's wife, the beautiful Rezi, draws her into an impassioned and heartbreaking affair. In Claudine Married Claudine pits her uniquely sensuous spirit against the challenges of married life and the conflicts of forbidden love in one of Colette's most moving and powerful novels.

Reviews

Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful -- Raymond Mortimer, Vogue
This most French of all French writers . . . 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 * New York Times *
She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully greedily alive to every sensation and experience * Guardian *
Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France -- New York Times Book Review
A perfectionist in her every word -- Spectator

Author Bio

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 in 1873, into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she was brought to Paris by her first husband, the notorious Henry Gauthiers-Villars (Willy), writer and critic. By dint of locking her in her room, Willy forced Colette to write her first novels, which he published under his name. They were an instant success. But their marriage was never happy and Colette left him in 1906. She spent the next six years on the stage - an experience, like that of her early childhood, which would provide many of the themes of her work. She remarried, later divorcing her second husband, by whom she had a daughter. In 1935 she married Maurice Goudeket, with whom she lived until her death in 1954. With the publication of Cheri Colette's place as one of France's prose masters became assured. Although she became increasingly crippled with arthritis, she never lost her intense preoccupation with everything around her. 'I cannot interest myself in anything that is not life,' she said; and, to a young writer, 'Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you.' Her rich and supple prose, with its sensuous detail and sharp psychological insights, illustrates that personal philosophy. Her writing runs to fifteen volumes, novels, portraits, essays, chroniques and a large body of autobiographical prose. She was the first woman President of the Academie Goncourt, and when she died was given a state funeral and buried in Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.