Melvourne: I think collette writes with an honesty about the difficulties of being a woman in contempory culture. We need writers who are prepared to be honest about how young women feel and think, she says. She's also tremendously sympathetic to boys, men mas nity, but they're not simply kind of foils against which the women play off. They're treated very interestingly and unusually - that's one thing we might want to emphasize is her subversion of rigid Janime categories. And i think it's just very exciting to read a writer whois writing, some time ago now, who was already exploring the possibility of abandoning those rigid categories.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French writers of the twentieth century. The novels of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 - 1954) always had women at their centre, from youth to mid-life to old age, and they were phenomenally popular, at first for their freshness and frankness about women’s lives, as in the Claudine stories, and soon for their sheer quality as she developed as a writer. Throughout her career she intrigued readers by inserting herself, or a character with her name, into her works, fictionalising her life as a way to share her insight into the human experience.
With
Diana Holmes
Professor of French at the University of Leeds
Michèle Roberts
Writer, novelist, poet and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
And
Belinda Jack
Fellow and Tutor in French Literature and Language at Christ Church, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson