Episode Details

In August 1954 the French state gave Colette a full state funeral, the first ever granted to a woman of letters, while the Catholic Church refused her a religious burial. This episode unpacks the contradiction behind that scene: a girl from rural Burgundy, daughter of a one-legged Zouave war hero and a fiercely independent mother, who married the Parisian libertine Willy at twenty and was locked in a room until she produced the pages that became the Claudine novels, published under his name alone.

From destitution after the divorce to pantomime on the music-hall stage, the near riot over an on-stage kiss with Mathilde de Morny at the Moulin Rouge, gritty crime reporting, the novels Cherie and The Vagabond, her fraught choices during the German occupation while her Jewish husband Maurice Goudeket faced the Gestapo, the writing of Gigi at seventy-one and her discovery of Audrey Hepburn, the conversation follows a woman who erased the line between autobiography and fiction and forced the literary world to take the female experience seriously.

• The Napoleonic Code, Willy's copyright and why Colette walked away with nothing
• The 1907 Reve d'Egypte pantomime that ended with police clearing the theatre
• Journalism, the color of blood on sheets, and a commitment to sensory truth
• Occupied Paris: Maurice's arrest, collaborationist newspapers and lasting controversy
• Gigi, nine Academy Awards, the Nobel rejection and Judy Chicago's Womanhouse tribute