Le Pur et l'impur was written in 1932 by French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. It is not a traditional novel in its structure; it consists of different conversations about sex, sexual attraction and gender, and is far less fictional than its categorization as a novel implies. Colette declared it to be her favorite of all her work, and also admitted that it was almost more of a memoir than a novel.
Despite Colette's enthusiasm for the book, critics were far less enamored. They could not find a string to tie the anecdotes together and found them all rather unrelated, despite their similar subject matter, and many disliked the detached way in which the conversations deals with sex and sexual attraction whilst being so obviously devoid of any emotional depth, or love. Some critics felt that the book was beneath Colette; she had always proved herself to be more than a reporter of gossip, yet the book was really a collection of observations about other people's sexual affairs and proclivities.
Colette saw the novel as semi auto-biographical because for much of her life she had been fascinated by the subject of sexual attraction; although married, her husband encouraged her lesbian tendencies and also encouraged her to use them as the subject matter for many of her earlier books. After her divorce, she wrote less about sex and more about the way in which women found it challenging to live truly independent lives in a male dominated society.
Colette published two volumes of official memoirs during World War II, as she waited for her Jewish husband's release from the hands of the Gestapo. She also published Gigi during the war years. It is her most famous work and was adapted for the big screen in 1958. Colette won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Although for much of her career she had tended to be dismissed as a writer a great deal, she is now widely considered to be the most influential voice of women in France of her generation.
