Colette française (et fille de zouave)

This article argues that French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette occupies a central position in the canon of French women’s writing, and that from this position her reception was deeply influential in the development of the myth of French singularity. After World War I, a style of femininity associated with Colette (natural, instinctive, antirational) became more largely synonymous with good French women’s writing, and writers who did not correspond to the “genre Colette” were excluded from narratives of the history of French women’s writing. Characteristics associated with Colette’s writing did not shift drastically before and after the war, but, in the wake of the Great War, these characteristics were nationalized and became French.