Claudine à l'école Reading Order

Claudine à l'école (1900) by Colette (published under her husband Willy's name) is the novel that launched one of the great French literary careers and immediately scandalized and delighted fin-de-siècle Paris. Claudine is a sharp, sensual, ironic fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in Montigny-en-Fresnois (the Burgundian village of Colette's own childhood), and the novel is her diary account of her final year at the village school — the teachers' intrigues and rivalries, the girls' sexual awakenings (including Claudine's own attraction to one of the teachers), the school inspector's visit, and the general social comedy of a closed provincial female world. The novel was an immediate bestseller, and Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars) understood its commercial potential better than its literary value: he produced three sequels (Claudine à Paris, Claudine en ménage, Claudine s'en va) before the marriage ended and Colette reclaimed her work. The Claudine novels established several things that would define Colette's mature work: the precise observation of female experience from inside, the sensuous attention to the physical world, the dry irony about social convention, and the frank acknowledgment of female sexuality that was new in French fiction. The character of Claudine — sharp, free, sexual, unintimidated by convention — was immediately recognizable as a new kind of female protagonist in French literature.