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Hello, Kaleh, 1873 to 1954 was one of the outstanding French writers of the 20th century and uniquely her novels always

had women at their centre from youth to midlife to old age. They were phenomenally popular

at first for their freshness and frankness about women's lives, as in the

Claudine stories, but soon also for the sheer quality she developed as a writer.

And throughout she's intrigued readers by inserting herself or a character with her name into the works,

fictionalizing her life as a way to share her insights into the human experience.

With me to discuss Colette R. Downer Holmes, Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds,

Michelle Roberts, writer, novelist, poet, and emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the

University of East Anglia and

English at Christchurch University of Oxford.

Belinda Jack, what was Kolet's early life like?

She had a wonderful childhood and she wrote a great deal about it and wrote it into much of her writing.

She had wonderful parents in many ways, particularly her mother, Cido. Her mother encouraged her in all sorts of ways that were key to

her development as a writer. Such as her reading. So there was there were no restraints on what she read and she read a great deal of Balzac, which I think you can see in her fiction.

But she also had enormous physical freedom. She grew up in rural Burgundy, in a small village, Saint-Souver, en pouisee. She enjoyed going to the local school. But it's probably the freedom she had and the relative solitude of much of her

childhood that's perhaps most striking and one reason for that was because she came

from a family that was considered

slightly grander than most families in the village. Why was that? Well they had more

...