The Vagabond

'Nothing is real except the dance, the light, the freedom, the music.'

Colette's semi-autobiographical novel The Vagabond (1910) follows thirty-three-year-old Renée Néré as she embarks on a stage career after a divorce from philandering ex-husband, painter Adolphe Taillandy. Unlike the earlier Claudine series, which began as a collaboration between Colette and her first husband, Colette worked alone on The Vagabond to create a leading lady navigating the Parisian working world on her own terms. The music hall performers are Renée's familiars and confidants, her fellow vagabonds; for the first time, the reader is offered a look behind the scenes from a woman's perspective, a view enabled by Colette's own simultaneous experience as writer and dancer. Unambiguously feminist and unabashedly sensual, The Vagabond established Colette as a serious novelist, showcasing her talent as an observer of the natural world and a painter of the beauty of the human form.


Frances Egan's new translation provides a fresh take on Colette's voice, offering a highly readable text which pulls readers into Renée's world, while preserving as much of the original context as possible to bring Paris, the music hall, and its crew of vagabonds, to life. Attention is paid to Colette's depiction of class, race, and gender. Helen Southworth's in-depth introduction places the book in the context of Colette's life, offers background on Belle Epoque theatre and feminisms, and traces its reception and its importance to readers from Colette's time to our own.

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Colette

Frances Egan is a translator and lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. She has published widely on representations of gender, culture and feminism in the French and Francophone context.

Helen Southworth is a professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon. She is the co-founder of the digital initiative the Modernist Archives Publishing Project or MAPP. Her areas of expertise include modernism, comparative literature, Virginia Woolf, life-writing and archives. She is the author of The Intersecting Realities and Fictions of Virginia Woolf and Colette (2004) and Fresca: A Life in the Making (2017).