Colette

Abstract This book embodies a rereading of certain texts by Colette that have felt, and feel, important to me both as a reader and as a writer. The My Reading series encourages a personal, subjective account of the books chosen for rereading. Colette was a pioneering, groundbreaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. I write about her invention of new forms to express her unsettling content (to do with desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love)—for example, her mixing of fiction, memoir, and letters in Break of Day, her use of the horror genre mixed with apparent autobiography in The Rainy Moon, her mixing of fairy tale and autobiography in La Maison de Claudine. I write about her breaking of taboos around older woman and desire, as in Cheri, and her drawing on Christian imagery of paradise to create a subtext about incestuous desire. I write admiringly about Colette’s freedom in exploring apparently perverse forms of love. I emphasize throughout the importance of the mother figure as inspiration, sometimes behind the text and sometimes at its centre.