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Translated from the French by Margaret Crosland
Retreat From Love is one of the best of Colette’s
celebrated ‘Claudine’ novels. It was the first to
be written under her own name, without the influence of her
husband, the Svengali Willy, from whom she had recently separated.
A tale of the sexual and emotional machinations of three upper-class
youths in a remote farmhouse, Retreat From Love shows
the work of a newly mature Colette, a novelist now to be judged
by the highest standards.
In an isolated farmhouse in the Jura, Claudine awaits her
husband Renaud’s return from a Swiss sanatorium. She
distracts herself by encouraging her young friend Annie to
recount salacious episodes from her love life. When Renaud’s
homosexual son Marcel arrives Claudine sets about matchmaking,
a fiasco she bitterly regrets.
With Renaud’s death, Claudine’s ennui is transmuted
into resigned suffering. But she gradually allows the rhythm
and beauty of the natural world to reawaken her desire to
live.
‘The realization that Colette was a major literary
talent is apparent on every page.’ – Irish
Times
‘Retreat From Love is an important book in the
Colette canon, for it shows Colette becoming aware of the
value of her feeling of oneness with nature and learning
to express it simply and poetically.’ – Times
Literary Supplement
‘With languid abandonment Colette descibes sexual games
played by three aristocrats . . . This English translation
admirably captures the eroticism of the prose.’ – The
Times
SIDONIE GABRIELLE COLETTE was born in Burgundy in 1873.
The foremost French woman author of her time, she made her
name with the ‘Claudine’
series of novels and established herself as an outstanding
talent with further novels and prose works which are notable
for their sensitive understanding and portrayal of nature
and country life. She died in Paris in 1954. |
