Product Description
Chéri
Author: Colette
Format: Paperback
A vivid, believable love story between an older woman and a younger man.
Léa de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career. She has devoted the last six years to the amorous education of the exquisitely handsome and spoilt Chéri - a playboy half her age. When an advantageous marriage is arranged for Chéri, Léa reluctantly decides their relationship must end. But neither lover can foresee how deeply they are connected, or how much they will have to give up.
First published in 1920, it was instantly greeted by Marcel Proust and André Gide as a masterpiece.
'I devoured Chéri at a gulp. What a wonderful subject and with what intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh' — André Gide
About the 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.
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