Writer Colette’s classic works brought to life in a unique audio collectionListen for the first time to this stunning collection of five of Colette’s most celebrated works, compiled and created by BBC Radio. French author and woman of letters, Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi, which became the stage musical launching the career of Audrey Hepburn. Known for her frank, direct and honest way of writing about women and female friendships, Colett...

GIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITEGigi's days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions: the education of a future courtesan. Bored and unconvinced by what she's taught, Gigi surprises all with her approach to love. In this classic turn-of-the-century novella, Colette unveils Gigi's journey into womanhood in rich and supple prose.This edition includes The Cat translated by Antonia White.

Colette's celebrated novels about an older courtesan and her young lover, now in a new translation and published in one volume.Colette’s Chéri (1920) and its sequel, The End of Chéri (1926), are widely considered her masterpieces. In sensuous, elegant prose, the two novels explore the evolving inner lives and the intimate relationship of an unlikely couple: Léa de Lonval, a middle-aged former courtesan, and Fred Peloux, twenty-five years her junio...

Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealth widow. Julie de Carneilhan was the last full-length novel Colette was to write as was 'as close a reckoning with the elements of her second marriage as she ever allowed herself.'In Chance Acquaintances Colette visits a health resort accompanied only by her cat. While there, she befriends the handsome Gerard...

First published in 1920, Chéri is one of Colette's most incisive explorations of desire, aging, and social performance in the world of Belle Époque and postwar Paris. The novel follows Léa, a cultivated courtesan nearing fifty, and her beautiful young lover Chéri, whose marriage exposes the fragility beneath their seemingly elegant detachment. Written in Colette's famously exact, sensuous prose, the book combines psychological realism with a theatrical awareness of gesture, costume, and si...

Edited and with an introduction by Robert PhelpsThe hundred short stories collected here include such masterpieces as 'Bella-Vista', 'The Tender Shoot' and 'Le K-pi', Colette's subtle and ruthless rendering of a woman's belated sexual awakening. Shot through with the colours and flavours of the Parisian world and fertile French countryside, these short stories reverberate with the fine-spun desire, wit and psychological acuity that made Colette unique.

Let’s be clear. We are all equal under the law. However, even in these more modern times that is not an absolute and still remains a distant ambition for many.In the days when Britain ruled the waves and bestrode the world as its policeman and plunderer in chief it also subjugated half of its own people to second class status. Women were chattel and property. There were some exceptions based on wealth and birthright but for the overwhelming majority your lot was to fall in with the...

An exquisite new translation of Colette’s tragicomic masterpiece, a pair of novels exploring the relationship between an aging courtesan and a much younger manChéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri, mark Colette’s finest achievements in their brilliant, subtle, and frank investigations of love and power.Set in the Parisian demimonde in the last days of the Belle Époque, Chéri tells the story of Léa, a courtesan at the end of a suc...

‘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-siècle 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 protégée 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...

Largely autobiographical, La Vagabonde recalls the author’s own years as a dance-hall performer in turn-of-the-century Paris. Colette takes the listener backstage and into the demimonde of Renée Néré, an aging dancer, mime, and failed writer. In a sultry, passionate, and intelligent voice, Renée narrates the story of her romance with an admirer named Maxime. Her struggle is that of a woman who must choose between freedom and love.

Claudine in Paris, the second novel in Colette's celebrated Claudine sequence, transports its sharp-eyed heroine from the provincial schoolroom of Montigny to the more ambiguous social and erotic terrain of the capital. Written in a supple, intimate first-person style, the novel blends diary-like immediacy with ironic social observation, tracing Claudine's convalescence, family entanglements, and initiation into Parisian sophistication. Within the context of fin-de-siècle French literature...