Wild Cat

A fierce, sensual loner who lived entirely on her own terms.

The French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was fiercely independent, deeply private about her inner world, and utterly unconventional — she left a stifling marriage, performed on stage in scandalous ways, and wrote with obsessive, sensory precision about desire, freedom, and the natural world. Like a wild-cat, she was comfort-loving and hedonistic yet unpredictable and untameable, refusing to conform to the expectations of early 20th-century womanhood. Her entire life and career were defined by doing things completely on her own terms, guarding her creative solitude even while living a dramatically public existence.