Correspondence in Two Cultures: The Social Ties Linking Colette and Virginia Woolf

A surprising omission from the catalogue of studies of Virginia Woolf and her fellow writers is an exploration of the relationship the English writer shared with her French contemporary, Gabrielle Sidonie Colette.¹ Contrary to the popular view that Virginia Woolf and Colette would have had little to say to each other, the two writers had friends and acquaintances in common, knew each other's work, and wrote on similar themes.² Both occupy prominent positions in their respective traditions: Colette is perhaps the best-known woman writer of the early twentieth century in France, as Virginia Woolf is in England. More significantly perhaps, they are at the core of a series of relationships, both social and literary, which reveal a good deal about the links between England and France in the early years of modernism.

While it appears unlikely that Woolf and Colette ever met, they certainly communicated, albeit indirectly. Evidence suggests that they knew each other's work.³ This mutual knowledge was facilitated in part by the network of friends that they shared, many of whom traveled frequently between England and France. These mutual acquaintances included, among others, the Singer Sewing Machine heiress Winnie de Polignac; the composer, suffragist, and writer Ethel Smyth; the writers Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge; the poet Comtesse Anna de Noailles; and the photographer Gisèle Freund.⁴ Several of these women were themselves part English or American and part continental European (for example, Sackville-West, de Polignac, and Trefusis), their itinerant lifestyles a result of their search for a place where their unconventional ways and ideas—for many of them, their homosexuality or bisexuality—would not raise eyebrows. Some (such as de Polignac) had close relationships with both Colette and Woolf; others had first-hand experiences with one or both writers, as did Trefusis and Freund; and still others had contact with one and indirect contact with the other. Vita Sackville-West learned about Colette from Violet Trefusis; Troubridge and Hall, not part of the Bloomsbury set, had a professional rather than a personal relationship with Woolf. If one retraces these relationships and encounters, both the long-lived and the fleeting, one finds a paper trail, in French and in English (such as Eleanor Butler's journal, described in Colette's Le Pur et l'impur) that leads from Woolf to Colette and from Colette to Woolf. Some of these writers write about both Woolf and Colette, in some cases at length; however, none makes explicit comparisons between the two women or their work.

Woolf (1882-1941) and Colette (1873-1954) lived and wrote at approximately the same time: Colette's first novel, Claudine à l'école, was published under her first husband's name, Willy, in 1900; her last, Le fanal bleu appeared in 1949; Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915; her last, Between the Acts, was published posthumously by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1941.

Woolf wrote often about France,⁵ at times describing her relationship to the French in reference to Colette, each time contrasting herself with her French contemporary. In a letter dated July 29, 1936, Woolf tells Jane Bussy⁶ that Colette's autobiographical work, Mes Apprentissages (which Woolf read in the original), makes her feel "dowdy." She extends her comparison of herself with her French contemporary to the French in general:

What a good friend you are, my dear Janie, to remember that book. It has come at the nick of time when I've nothing to read. And it looks—for I've only just cut the pages—full of the most entrancing, wicked, underworld Bohemian life, and just after my taste, although I still can't think how Colette being what she is, to look at, ever sent me her discourse with that cryptic...