Recommendations
Books Like Claudine à l'école by Colette
Books for readers who love the sharp-tongued girl narrator and the female Bildungsroman without self-pity
Claudine à l'école (1900) launched Colette's career with a fifteen-year-old narrator more knowing than anyone around her — observing, desiring, and dismissing with the dry wit of a future great writer. These 8 books share its female intelligence, its provincial school world, and its refusal of sentiment.
- 1
Buy on AmazonClaudine à Paris
by Colette
The direct sequel — Claudine arrives in Paris with her father; the sharp provincial intelligence applied to the capital; still published under Willy's name
- 2
Buy on AmazonLa Vagabonde
by Colette
Colette's first post-Willy novel — the music-hall performer who refuses to give up her freedom for love; the mature Colette voice that the Claudine novels were developing toward
- 3
Buy on AmazonSido
by Colette
Colette's portrait of her own mother and the Burgundian childhood that formed her — the real landscape and real woman behind Claudine's Montigny and Claudine's freedom
- 4
Buy on AmazonJane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
The sharp, self-reliant female protagonist who observes and judges her world accurately — Jane's moral intelligence and Claudine's social intelligence are the two poles of the smart girl narrator
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Getting of Wisdom
by Henry Handel Richardson
Australian contemporary of the Claudine novels — Laura Rambotrham at school, sharp and alienated and observing everything; the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of Claudine's provincial sharpness
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
The school novel from the teacher's side rather than the student's — Miss Brodie's charisma as the obverse of Claudine's sharp eye; together they map the female school world from both positions
- 7
Buy on AmazonBonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan
The French successor to the Claudine tradition — Cécile's sharp sexual observation of her father and Anne, told with the same dry, knowing tone that Claudine pioneered fifty years earlier
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's portrait of girls in a small American town — the female community and its cruelties as the American parallel to Claudine's French provincial school world
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