Colette – Claudine at School

Wicked, vicious and enchanting – girl power in France, circa 1900

A major effect of my sequential twentieth century challenge is that reading in this way will inevitably take me outside the book itself as an isolated reading experience, and focus some attention on the time, culture and geography of its arising – and, I suspect, I shall happily be drawn into ‘biographical fallacy’ as there is always a life being lived (the author’s) in that time, culture and geography. And sat within the twenty-first century, it will no doubt be interesting to see how much we consider to be modern and new is of course, merely a spiral: specific manifestations may change, but the form remains the same

So, turning to Colette’s first novel, Claudine at School, the story of a racy minx of a fifteen year old in a perhaps unusual school in Burgundy, which was published in…