An Author by any other Name by Joy Margetts
'Colette' In the strange nothingness between Christmas and New Year, I watched a lot of films. One of those was Colette (2018). It tells the story of Sidonie -Gabrielle Colette , the prolific French novelist of the early 20 th century. I admit I found some of the film made me both blush and cringe, and if you are of a delicate constitution when it comes to hedonism being played out on the screen in explicit detail, you have been warned. But it was worth watching for the way it unpacked Colette’s relationship with her first husband, Henri Gautier- Villars . How he ‘forced’ her to write her semi-autobiographical stories and how he ‘stole’ the credit for the four Claudine novels published between 1900 and 1903, with his own pen name ‘Willy’ as the author. Many years later, when she had successfully proved the books were her own work, she was quoted as saying that she would never have become a writer without Willy. He in turn claimed that the books would not have been nearly ...