Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

Our authors for the following two months are Colette from France and Elsa Morante from Italy.

Which books are you thinking of reading?

Colette was the pen-name of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, born in 1873 and died in 1954.
In 1893 Colette married the writer and publisher Henry Gauthier-Villars, who wrote using the pen-name Willy.
Colette's first four novels, the Claudine stories, were published using Willy's name.
The marriage didn't last and the couple separated in 1906 and the divorce was finalized in 1910. Colette received non of the earnings from the books she had written, so she had to find a new way to earn money-first by acting and then more seriously by journalism and photography.
Colette had a very colourful life and became a very succesful and established writer.
She died in 1954 and was denied a religious funeral by the Roman Catholic Church due to her divorces. However, she was granted the first state funeral ever given to a French woman of letters and is buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Elsa Morante was born in Rome in 1912 and died in 1984. She started writing stories and children's stories in the 1930s, and her first book published in 1941 was a collection of some of these stories.
In 1941 she married a fellow-writer, Alberto Moravia. They left Rome during the war due to their Jewish heritage. Their stay in a small village in southern Lazio inspired both writers. Morante wrote History/La Storia and Moravia wrote Two Women, which was later made into a film starring Sophia Loren.
In 1961 the couple separated without divorcing. Both were very successful prize-winning writers.
Elsa was very fond of cats, but I don't know how Alberto felt about them.