Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette wrote the four Claudine novels in her twenties, locked in a room by a husband who published them as his own and pocketed the money; they were the bestsellers of their day. When she left him she had no rights to her most famous books and earned her living for years on the music-hall stage, miming and dancing, which scandalised polite Paris and taught her the material for La Vagabonde.

She wrote about desire, animals, food and the countryside of Burgundy with a precision that made even hostile critics concede the prose. Chéri and the late Gigi are the best known; the second became a film that fixed her name abroad. She was president of the Académie Goncourt and the first Frenchwoman given a state funeral, in 1954 — which the Catholic Church refused to attend, on the grounds of her divorces. Crippled by arthritis, she spent her last years writing from a divan overlooking the gardens of the Palais-Royal. She is buried at Père-Lachaise under a plain slab bearing only her name.