Colette: My Literary Mother [Hardcover]

Prize-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and memoirist Mich?le Roberts tells of her experience of reading the novels of French writer Colette, whose work has inspired and encouraged her throughout her own writing life.The power of Colette's work comes from its modernist storytelling.Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes.In this book, Mich?le Roberts examines how Colette invents new forms to express her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love. Delving into four key texts, Roberts explores Colette's willingness to break open taboos about older woman and desire, as well as hidden and forbidden aspects of human longings and pleasures.Through these re-readings, Roberts discovers that Colette's work is even more entrancing, more disturbing, and more original than she first thought.Introduction: Re-Reading Colette1. Mother-House2. Mother Remembered3. Mother Re-Found and Rejected4. Unmothered UntetheredMich?le Roberts,Novelist, poet, and Professor Emeritus, University of East AngliaMich?le Roberts has published fifteen novels and her most recent isCut Out(2021). Her novel Daughters of the House (1993) won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has published three collections of short stories and eight of poetry, as well as two memoirs and one collection of essays,Food, Sex & God: on Inspiration and Writing(1998), and most recently two cookery books. With the artist Caroline Isgar, she has published four artist's books. She has written two plays, both of which were performed, and one short film for Channel 4. This is critical thinking that is intimate, enchanting, and necessary. -- Deborah Levy

I adored l#9