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...

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...

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...

‘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...

The stories in "Barks and Purrs" are charming and often whimsical, offering insightful and humorous glimpses into the lives of these beloved pets. Colette's writing style is known for its keen observation, vivid descriptions, and a deep understanding of the animals' behaviors and personalities.Through these stories, Colette captures the essence of the relationships between humans and their furry companions, portraying the animals' distinctive traits and the unique bonds they form with thei...

Journey through the sexual underworld of Belle Époque Paris in the first new English translation of Colette’s masterpiece in nearly sixty years.Lyrical, allusive, sometimes obscure, yet precise, The Pure and the Impure has elicited equal parts consternation and praise since its publication nearly 100 years ago. Colette herself was unequivocal: “I believe it to be my best book.” Through strikingly vivid and evocative portraits, many of them of her friends a...

Claudine at School follows a sardonic fifteen‑year‑old through her final year in a provincial Burgundian girls' school, narrated as a pungent diary whose quicksilver tones shift from prank to sensual reverie. Claudine anatomizes classroom hypocrisies—above all the charged liaison between the headmistress and her assistant—while registering first desires. Colette's lapidary metaphors and botanical precision place the book within fin‑de‑siècle satire of the Third Republic's secular pedagogy ...