1. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name.
17 Facts About Colette
1. 2.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy.
3.
Colette's father, Captain Jules-Joseph Colette was a war hero.
4.
Colette was a Zouave of the Saint-Cyr military school, who had lost a leg at Melegnano in the Second Italian War of Independence.
5.
Colette was awarded a post as tax collector in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye where his children were born.
6.
Colette's great-grandfather, Robert Landois, was a wealthy Martinican mulatto, who settled in Charleville in 1787.
7.
Colette attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17.
8.
In 1893, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, an author and publisher 14 years her senior, who used the pen name "Willy".
9.
The marriage to Gauthier-Villars allowed Colette to devote her time to writing.
10.
Colette later said she would never have become a writer if it had not been for Willy.
11.
In 1912, Colette married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin.
12.
In 1920, Colette published Cheri, portraying love between an older woman and a much younger man.
13.
Colette was 67 years old when France was occupied by the Germans.
14.
In 1944, Colette published what became her most famous work, Gigi, which tells the story of the 16-year-old Gilberte Alvar.
15.
Colette continued to write during those years and published L'Etoile Vesper and Le Fanal Bleu, in which she reflected on the problems of a writer whose inspiration is primarily autobiographical.
16.
Colette was nominated by Claude Farrere for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
17.
Colette was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy, the Academie Goncourt, and a Chevalier and Grand Officer of the Legion d'honneur.