Colette, My Literary Mother by Michèle Roberts

Reviewed by Victoria Best, 13 Feb 2025

Colette is, I think, a very special writer. She writes with such beguiling charm, such seductive cleverness that she gets under your skin. To read her is to enter into a relationship with her, to be entranced by her voice and her way of seeing things. I think it’s partly because her works offer a burnished version of reality, one that is full of sensual pleasure and also more sparklingly lucid, more manageable than the quotidian world we inhabit. Her books are wonderful havens in which to live for a while. And so, it made complete sense to me that the writer, Michèle Roberts, should write about her work in a way that claims kinship; what half surprised me is that she should call Colette a mother. A smart older sister, a teasing friend, an aunt with a particularly level and frank stare, perhaps. But Colette has never struck me as anyone’s mother. She’s always wise but she’s not always nice. She wasn’t even a particularly good mother to her own child. But by the time I reached the end of this beautiful, insightful book, I felt that Roberts was onto something even more radical than she realised, and that Colette has something especially significant to say to us still. But let me tell you about the book first.

Roberts takes four of Colette’s well-known works to reread and revisit: My Mother’s House/La Maison de Claudine, Break of Day/Naissance du jour, Chéri and La Lune de pluie/Rainy Moon. In these stories she tracks Colette’s relationship both to her own mother, Sido, and to her understanding of what mothers do. The brilliance of Roberts’ reading is to see how these different ways of writing the act of mothering pushed Colette into creating – or let’s say giving birth to – new forms of literature.

In My Mother’s House, Colette creates a series of vignettes that are apparently drawn from her own childhood and that tessellate together into an extended origin story concerning mother and child. The tone is loving and admiring, laughingly joyful, and Sido is a kind of goddess, all-powerful, capricious, original, unpredictable, demanding. She rules the domestic world with a whim of iron. And yet, what we know from countless biographies is that the real story of Sido is much more complicated. Some biographers have seen Sido as a controlling and emotionally abusive mother and she was certainly possessive. The story of her first marriage, which Colette turns into a delightfully Gothic tale, is a horror story in which Sido was married off by her brothers to a depressive alcoholic who was quick with his fists. The story of Colette’s half-sister, Juliette, is one of chilling exile and excommunication of a damaged woman from the family. And Colette herself was not quite the adored princess and the centre of her mother’s world that she claims to be. Sido’s favourite child was her first born, Achille, and Colette was known to be furiously jealous of him.

So what is Colette doing? Rereading La Maison de Claudine, Roberts says, she noticed that it is ‘distinguished by being a work preoccupied with narrative form, and in particular with those forms encountered in its author’s childhood: oral storytelling, myths and fairy tales.’ These forms are handed down by Sido, who ‘is shown throughout as herself a teller of tales, an inventor of myths, a juggler with words.’ Traditionally, and certainly when Colette was writing, it was the father who owned language and the authority to use it. But now Sido, who was nothing if not subversive and blithely indifferent to orthodoxy, offers Colette a different kind of muse. In one vignette she describes how her impious mother, in church, would read Corneille’s plays disguised by ‘a missal-like cover’. The message, Roberts says, is ‘if you cannot directly overcome a powerful authority, you can decide to ignore it, or resist it with guile and cunning, At the same time she is giving us an example of how a writer can choose to work, insisting on the validity of her own perceptions and, crucially, mixing one kind of text with another.’ As Colette stitches her patchwork together, writing her tales the way she wants to, summoning the past and breathing new life into it, she is playing not just ordinary notions of authority, but with the normal precepts of time.

Colette shows us … that childhood keeps spring up inside us, refound and renewed and reinvented. The maternal house is not lost. Memory not only preserves things but brings them back alive. The past becomes the present. A resurrection. A magical conjuring.

In other words, Colette can be seen, in this collection, taking her mother’s unconventional lessons and putting them into unconventional action, creating her own mythology alongside a new kind of autofiction. Roberts points out that later in life, for all the reverence Colette shows to her mother in writing, she hardly ever went home and failed to attend Sido’s funeral. I have always thought that Colette, once she had created the mother figure she needed, was disinclined to trouble her vision with the real thing.

Naissance du jour or Break of Day is such a difficult book to write about, but Michèle Roberts does so beautifully. On the surface it’s a book about nothing much, about the middle-aged Colette having a lovely time in the South of France and renouncing interest in the young and virile Vial, handing him over in the end to the younger woman in the story, Hélène. It’s a book in which Colette takes up many roles, writing as author, as daughter, as epicurean and pleasure-seeker, as wise older woman renouncing love, and yet still capable of being an object of intense desire. Sido once again hovers over the narrative, bracketing it with letters that Colette supposedly quotes. You might not be surprised by now to realise that these letters are forgeries and express sentiments Sido did not have. But the power of the mother to rule over the text, to enfold it in her loving embrace, is to throw aside the rules of linear time. Michèle Roberts describes how:

The characters’ vacillations, towards each other and away, towards possible futures and away, are re-enacted in the book’s shifts in time, darting back and forth between present and past. Colette’s reverie holds everything very gently and loosely, her looping, circling, darting free associations making the book a roman fleuve, while at the same time Colette senses herself as held eternally in her mother’s reverie… Maternal time, as I have said above, is not ordinary time.

Colette’s wisdom is not ordinary wisdom, either. This is the book in which she waves the flag for menopausal women, who she suggests could still be femme fatales if they really wanted the bother of it, but who might well decide there are other far more reliable pleasures than those of a man’s love. In reality, while she was writing this book, Colette was in fact living with the much younger Maurice Goudeket, and would eventually marry him. Roberts makes delightful mincemeat of the French critic Claude Pichois, who criticized Colette for not following her own dictates, which of course, is missing the point entirely.

Roberts third choice of text, Chéri, is the novel that is most likely to be known by most keen readers. This is the story of middle-aged courtesan, Léa de Lonval, and her toy boy, Chéri, whose blissful idyll is interrupted by Chéri’s impending society marriage. The two part, feigning indifference, but miss each other so much that they are pushed to a rapturous reunion. Only… the time away has changed Chéri more than he realises, and in the cold light of dawn, he sees Léa for the older woman she is, with sagging chins and wrinkles. Michèle Roberts produces an exquisite reading of this novel, showing how Colette creates a thematic palimpsest, overlaying elements of the Fall with a late-life, misplaced mother-child relationship. But it’s the experience of reading this book that she gets so right:

The book feels physical and alive: something is breathing under the surface of the text […] I want to say that the narrative, the novel’s body, is like fertile earth after rain, full of life, stirring with unseen energies and currents of meaning.

She just writes so well about Colette, digging deep into the layers of the text, identifying the games she plays with time and metaphor. The fact that Roberts is half-French, and that, as she says at the start of the book, she is ‘reading with my mother in mind. I am in conversation with her as I am with Colette’, brings an extra dimension to her critique. The final chapter concerns Rainy Moon, a 40-page short story that is one of my favourite works by Colette. If you’ve never read her – and you should try her at least once – then start here. It’s also my favourite of the readings Roberts makes. I won’t say any more in the hope that it might lead you to try Colette and, if possible, this book about her work. Half my PhD was on Colette, and I’ve read a lot of books about her and her texts. This is right up there with the very best of them, if not perhaps one of the finest books for combining Colette’s life with her writing (which is makes absolute sense to do – they go hand in hand). It’s insightful, unpretentious, wonderfully written and breathes fresh, new life into the act of literary criticism.

Reading this book reminded me why I loved Colette’s writing so much. Women are forever being told that we need to take care of ourselves, but few writers embody self-nurture in the way Colette did. Her characters (of which she was often one of the principal ones) are gourmands who revel in the sensual pleasure of food. When trouble arrives, as it always will, they turn to the markets and delicatessens, enjoying ‘a fresh loaf stuffed with butter and sardines’, ‘sausages, chicory, fruits and dates’; they admire ‘the oranges between the open sacks of rice and the sweating coffee, the red apples and the green split peas.’ This avid greed signals to Roberts that ‘She wants everything. The life force courses through her. We know she will survive.’ Colette did not deny herself things, whether they were food, lovers, freedom, boundaries, or forms of self-validation. ‘She loved herself,’ Roberts writes, ‘approved of her own desires. She had found her creative power and it was linked to appetite.’ Colette shows us that ‘as adults, we can cherish these energies rather than feel obliged to repudiate them; we can link them to our need to explore the world in thought, through creativity.’ This is how it is to read Colette, and it struck me, reading this excellent book, that there IS an act of mothering to be enjoyed here. It’s a radical kind, indifferent to laws and regulations, to cultural edicts about our bodies and our behaviour. The language of Colette, the mother tongue passed down through the generations, is attentive to pleasure first and foremost, and to creativity as a close-run second. All the things women must lose – with shame and regret we are told – youth and beauty, our waistlines and our submission, Colette says aren’t worth worrying about. She’s the mother that middle-aged women never knew they needed.

Victoria is one of Shiny’s co-founders, now Editor at Large. She blogs at Tales from the Reading Room.

Michèle Roberts, Colette, My Literary Mother by Michele Roberts, (Oxford University Press, 2024). 978-0192858214, 160pp., hardback.

BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)