Claudine at School by Colette

Started: 12 July
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187

I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s.  I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.

More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time.  Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.

I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay.  But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay.  I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.

Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives.  This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name.  Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.

Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction.  And so it is.  It's  a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin.  The book's not quaint:  the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people.  And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern.  (Lesbians, oh my.)

Would I recommend it?  Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting.  Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.