In the Library
Claudine
Colette, 1900
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 4
- Length
- Length 78k words
£1.99
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What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
Colette's husband locked her in a room each afternoon until she filled the pages, then published the result under his own name, and for thirty years Claudine belonged, on paper, to a man who never wrote a word of her. What Paris devoured behind that name was fifteen-year-old Claudine herself: sharp-tongued, hair cropped short and boyish, roaming the schoolyard at Montigny in open pursuit of the classmates she loves and torments by turns, and of Mademoiselle Sergent, the headmistress she watches with an appetite she never once disguises. Nothing about her wants forgiveness. She notices the smell of chalk and wet hair in the same breath as desire, and trusts both instincts equally. Read her and adolescence stops sounding like a lesson survived; it becomes what it always was, a body arriving faster than the sense to steer it.