SOURCE: Roberts, Michèle. “On the Novels of Colette.” New Statesman 129, no. 4514 (27 November 2000): 58.

In the following essay, Roberts discusses the influence of French novelist Colette on her own life and fiction.

Colette has meant a lot to me both because of the books she wrote and the life she led. As a young writer in the 1970s, entering a literary world that was still dominated by masculine precepts and models, I sought for a tradition of fiction-writing that suggested possibilities of writing riskily, authentically, differently. Colette was a major modernist, producing a new sort of novel. I believe that the life she lived helped her to do this.

Colette is a writer beloved of other writers for the excellence of her style. She is beloved of women, in particular, for her courage in raising two fingers to the moral and literary establishments of her time. A female writer...