"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