Colette

Margaret Crosland

Retreat From Love is one of Colette's celebrated 'Claudine' novels. It was the first to be written under her own name, without the influence of her husband, the Svengali Willy, from whom she had recently separated. A tale of sexual and emotional trysts between three aristocratic youths, Retreat From Love shows the work of a newly mature Colette, a novelist who was now to be judged by the highest standards. In an isolated farmhouse in the Jura, Claudine awaits her husband Renaud's return from a Swiss sanatorium. She distracts herself by encouraging her young friend Annie to recount salacious episodes from her love life. When Renaud's homosexual son Marcel arrives Claudine sets about matchmaking, a fiasco she bitterly regrets.

Retreat from Love

Jean Cocteau

Recollections of Proust, Piaf, Colette, and a host of luminaries from Bohemian Paris For almost 50 years up until his death in 1963, Jean Cocteau held a unique place in French cultural life. The breadth of his artistic success bears witness to the astounding variety of his talents. In the fields of theater, cinema, art, ballet, and literature, Cocteau made many lifelong friends. Intimate portraits of some of the greatest artists of his age are included in this memorable memoir. Jean Cocteau was drawn to larger-than-life or seemingly unreal characters. He believed that their unreality was often the clue to the secrets of their personality. In descriptions of his contemporaries, Cocteau is able to illustrate everything that is accessible, sympathetic, memorable, durable, all-pervading, or dazzling about them. Ranging from the moving and atmospheric (the dying Proust in his cork-lined chamber) to the hilariously camp (Colette being carried from her apartment by sedan chair to have lunch across the road), it is in these portraits that the essence of his own work can be found. The portraits include Proust, Picasso, Piaf, Colette, Chaplin, and many more.

My Contemporaries

The Woman and Her Work

Simone de Beauvoir

Marquis de Sade

A collection of de Sade's stories utilizing gothic conventions and questioning sexual and societal mores The notorious author of pornographic novels and a sexual pervert who spent much of his life in prison and whose name was unmentionable in civilized circles, only in recent times has the Marquis come to be seen as misunderstood—essentially a moralist, his exploration of the so-called dark side of the human psyche remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own. This collection will provide an excellent introduction to Sade’s fiction; these accessible stories range from the dramatic novellaEugenie de Franval, in which a father’s criminal passion for his daughter leads to intrigue, abduction, and murder, to comic tales such asThe Husband Who Plays Priest, concerning a lecherous monk who finds an ingenious way to combine clerical duties with secular pleasures. De Sade’s gift as a humorist are much in evidence, as is his particular delight in unusual marital situations—which invariably lead to the most diverting conclusions.

Gothic Tales of the Marquis de Sade

In Duo, Colette observes, with masterly astuteness and perception, two characters whose marriage is foundering on the wife's infidelity. Acting out the final crisis, Alice and Michel have the stage to themselves so that nothing is allowed to distract from the marital dialogue. Le Toutounier continues Alice's story after Michel's death and her move to Paris. There she and her two sisters live in a shabby, homely apartment; fiercely independent, reticent, hard-working, needing men but showing little sign of loving them, they speak a private language and seek comfort in the indestructible sofa (toutounier) of their childhood.

And, Le Toutounier : Two Novels

Strange Tempe

Draws attention to the struggles of women to enter the mainstream of French literature since 1876 and the special qualities of these French women writers

French Women Writers After George Sand

Women of Iron and Velvet

Two Novels

Duo ; &, Le Toutounier

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Short stories and a novella, first posthumously published in France as Mon Amie Valentine. Set in France of the 1920's.

The Other Woman

The story of: the Marquise de Sade is inevitably linked to that of her husband, but Renee Pelagie de Montreuil gains the consideration she never received in her lifetime in this book by "one of the world's most distinguished scholars of Sade's work" -- The Independent. Who was Sade's wife? And why did she love him so devotedly for almost thirty years? Crosland competently shows how the Sade marriage symbolized the decay of the old aristocracy, and conveys the struggle of one individual to establish her personal identity at a time in France when women had virtually no rights of their own.

The Woman Behind the Marquis

Sade's Wife

Sex, Culture and Power

Madame de Pompadour

Mistress of Louis XIV and Louis XV, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, known as Madame de Pompadour, was a woman of remarkable grace, beauty, and wit.

Sex, Culture and the Power Game

This is the first biography of Madame de Pompadour, royal mistress to Louis XV, for many years, and gives a new interpretation of her strength as a woman.

Bonella van Beusekom

Biografie van de beroemde maîtresse (1721-1764) van de Franse koning Lodewijk XV.

een leven van macht en verleiding

Short stories and a novella by the infamous French pornographic writer

The Gothic Tales of the Marquis de Sade

Biografie van de Franse auteur Raymond Radiquet (1903-1923), die zeer bevriend was met Jean Cocteau. De biografie bevat een Engelstalige selectie uit zijn werk.

Margaret Crosland

About

Books

Join the club