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<‘Fine teeth, my girl. With teeth like that I’d have gobbled up Paris and the rest of the world.''
Gigi, a teenage girl in fin-de-siecle Paris, is being groomed by her family to become a high-class courtesan, just like her aunt and grandmother before her. But despite their best efforts, their timid protegee may have other ideas for her future...
Colette''s famous novella is a sly and delicate depiction of exploitation and resistance, and is paired here with the wonderful short story ‘The Cat’.<>
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.
