The Vagabond
About this ebook
‘It’s definitely me there, covered in purple rouge, eyes ringed with a halo of blue greasepaint that’s beginning to melt’
Renée, aged thirty-three and divorced from her serially unfaithful husband, reinvents herself as a dancer and mime artist in France’s music halls. When a wealthy suitor appears promising marriage and stability, Renée must choose between the security he represents and her hard-won life as an artist. Colette’s subversive novel of the stage was based on her experiences as a struggling music hall performer following her own divorce. By turns melancholy and funny, it is a pioneering work of autofiction and a vivid portrayal of one woman’s pursuit of freedom.
‘The story of a soul’s quest for liberation’ Erica Jong
Translated with an Introduction by Belinda Jack
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About the author
Colette (Author)
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in a village in Burgundy, France, and would later recall her bucolic home and eccentric family in the semi-fictionalized Claudine’s House. At the age of twenty, she married the publisher and author ‘Willy’, who encouraged her to write her first four novels. The novels made her famous, but her husband, under whose name they had been published, retained her earnings. Escaping her marriage, Colette became a performer in France’s music halls, an era of her life she would later describe in The Vagabond. She wrote her most famous works during the 1920s and 30s; these included Chéri, depicting a relationship between an older woman and young man, and Gigi, the story of a young girl in training to become a courtesan. Colette died in 1954.
Belinda Jack (Translator)
Belinda Jack is the author of an acclaimed biography of George Sand and Beatrice's Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci.
