The Cat and the Masked Woman

’My little puma! My darling cat! My mountain lion! How will you go on living if we leave each other?’

Colette (1873-1954) is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed French writers of the twentieth century. The Cat (first serialised then published in volume form in 1933) is one of her short novels. This story of a middle-class couple in 1920s Paris follows the familiar romantic structure of the ’eternal triangle’, with the unexpected twist that the female rival is not a woman but a cat. The novel displays her capacity to conjure up a vibrantly physical world and a particular social moment, her radical yet nuanced view of gender roles, and her empathy with non-human creatures. The Masked Woman is a collection of short texts, mainly written for the daily newspaper Le Matin, focusing on small moments that mark a transition in a person’s life, and on certain recurring themes: the pleasure and the pain in relationships between women and men, the wearing of masks both literal and metaphorical, female complicity and solidarity. They are also linked by Colette’s inimitable narrative style, by the vividly material fictional universe she creates, and her liking for surprise and paradox that challenges a commonsensical view of the world.

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Colette, Diana Holmes

Helen Constantine has translated many classic writers from French, including Zola, Laclos, Gautier, Flaubert, Balzac and Proust. She is the general editor of the City Tales series of short stories published by Oxford University Press.

Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds. She was named Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Government of France in 2023. She is the author of many books and articles on French women’s writing, from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period, and from ’highbrow’ to popular. Colette was the subject of her first book and has figured in much of her subsequent work. She also writes on film and co-founded the Manchester University Press series French Film Directors, as well as co-authoring the volume on Truffaut’s cinema.