Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in January 1873 in the French village of Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye. Her father, Jules, was a retired army captain-turned-tax collector, and her mother, Sido—who was Colette’s most enduring influence—had grown up among artists and political radicals in Belgium. Colette later wrote about her happy rural childhood and said she experienced her first lesbian sexual feelings when she was 11.

At age 20 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars (nicknamed Willy), a would-be writer and man-about-town 13 years her senior, who swept her off her feet and brought her to Paris. Willy encouraged her to write about her schoolgirl adventures, but the widely told story that he locked her in a room and forced her to write is most likely untrue. Colette’s racy tales—which Willy published under his own name, claiming they had been sent to him by an unknown girl—included Claudine à l’ecole (Claudine at School), in which rebellious, tomboyish Claudine develops a crush on one of her female teachers. The highly successful series ignited a schoolgirl fashion fad and spawned spin-off products such as Claudine cosmetics and cigarettes.

Colette and Willy won acclaim from the Parisian bourgeoisie and avant-garde alike. She came to embody the "new woman" of the French Belle Epoque, and aristocrats and members of the demimonde mingled at her salons. She became acquainted with the circle of lesbian writers Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien, and later chronicled these encounters in Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeships). Barney, a woman of prodigious sexual appetites, once said that Colette was one of her half (rather than full) conquests.

Weary of Willy’s domineering behavior, Colette divorced him in 1906 and became a music-hall performer. She began a six-year relationship with Napoleon III’s niece, the Marquise de Belboeuf (better known as Missy), a cross-dressing lesbian 10 years her senior. On one occasion Colette (playing an Egyptian mummy) and Missy (playing a male archeologist) performed a mime act at the Moulin Rouge that included a passionate kiss, setting off a riot in the theater.

Colette wrote about the gay and lesbian bars she visited, which were frequented by a "crowd of long-haired young lads and short-haired young girls." She also chronicled Missy’s circle of lesbian friends—"Baronesses of the Empire, lady cousins of the Czars, illegitimate daughters of Grand-dukes, exquisites of the Parisian bourgeoisie, and also some aged horsewomen of the Austrian aristocracy"—but resented the fact that they treated her like a courtesan.

By the 1920s Colette had achieved success as a novelist, drama critic, and journalist. At age 40 she married Henri de Jouvenel—an aristocrat and editor of Le matin newspaper—after finding herself accidentally pregnant with her only child, a daughter who would be neglected by both parents. Despite his own extramarital liaisons, de Jouvenel divorced Colette after learning of her affair with his son Bertrand, begun when the boy was 16 and she was 47.

In the early 1930s Colette wrote Ces plaisirs (Those Pleasures), better known by its later title, Le pur et l’impur (The Pure and the Impure). The book dealt frankly with female and male homosexuality, transgenderism, and sadism and masochism, featuring portraits of Missy (called "La chevaliére"), Renee Vivien and her female "master," and the Ladies of Llangollen (Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby). Colette considered it her finest work, but she is best known in the United States for her 1945 novella, Gigi, which was later made into a Broadway musical starring Audrey Hepburn (personally selected by Colette for the role).

Colette found a stable relationship late in life with her final husband, Maurice Goudeket, a Jewish pearl dealer 16 years her junior who had been forced into hiding and imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of France. She settled down with her pets and continued writing until an arthritic hand forced her to stop in her 70s. She died in August 1954 at age 81. While Colette was given a state funeral, she was refused a Catholic burial due to her divorces and the scandal that surrounded her during her lifetime.

Colette has been portrayed both as a subversive modern woman who defied gender roles and followed her own passions, and as a victim who sought love in vain. But with her disregard for conventional morality, perhaps the most apt description is one she coined for herself in her final autobiography: "erotic militant."