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<‘I was an independent, stray dog who answered to no one…’
Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond her house is the village, where travelling performers stop for the night and wedding feasts take place under a bright summer moon. Inside her house are Mama, who loves animals, and Papa, who lost his leg in the war, and a library full of forbidden and irresistible books...
Based on Colette’s own early life, Claudine’s House is a rich and enchanting depiction of childhood, animals, flowers, trees, books, families and love in late-nineteenth-century France.<>
About the author
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France, and would later recall her bucolic home and eccentric family in the semi-fictionalized Claudine’s House. At the age of twenty, she married the publisher and author ‘Willy’, who encouraged her to write her first four novels. The novels made her famous, but her husband, under whose name they had been published, retained her earnings. Escaping her marriage, Colette became a performer in France’s music halls, an era of her life she would later describe in The Vagabond. She wrote her most famous works during the 1920s and 30s; these included Chéri, depicting a relationship between an older woman and young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954.Belinda Jack is the author of an acclaimed biography of George Sand and Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.
