"Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was twenty when she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a literary entrepreneur known as Willy who was considerably older than she was. He set her to writing novels featuring a schoolgirl heroine, Claudine, which he published under his own name. He had been betraying her sexually almost from the moment he brought her to Paris from her native Burgundy. In *My Apprenticeships* (1936) she describes the early years of their marriage. " Phyllis Rose in *The Norton Book of Women's Lives*