She arrived in the salons of Paris around 1900 as the provincial child bride of a notorious rake and brilliant literary impressario, Willy, who signed her first novel - the Claudines - and claimed them as his own. They invented the erotically reckless teenage girl as we know her, becoming the greatest French bestsellers of their, and probably all, time. When this tumultuous marriage ended, Colette went off with a high-born woman lover, the virile Marquise de Belboeuf, and embarked on a flamboyant stage career. She bared her breast to raucous applause in the French music-hall. She became a celebrity of the lesbian demimonde. The Belle Epoque aesthetes found her irresistible, and she explored their addictions to forbidden pleasures along with her own. While building a reputation for hugely popular fiction, drama, memoir, criticism and scandal, Colette deserted Lesbos to marry Baron Henry de Jouvenel, one of Paris's most influential (and sexually charismatic) political journalists. She was the first woman to report from the front lines of World War I.

She edited the literary pages of a major daily. At forty-seven, she seduced her stepson. In 1935, a readers' poll named Colette the greatest living master of French prose. Until her death in 1954, she continued to rewrite the rules for loving, working, and ageing. And she never ceased to shock and disarm her public. Colette was a paradox of ferocity and seductiveness, of impure appetites and Olympian vitality, of sexual dissidence and social conservatism. Her art was never more pristine than in her last, anguished years, when she charmed the world with Gigi. At the end of the century, her life and work still have the power to challenge norms and to open eyes.

They have found in Judith Thurman a peerlessly witty and penetrating chronicler.