The Lighted Room

The book is a chronicle in the seasonal sense: its pieces are loosely arranged to run through a year, from late June around to spring, so that weather, festivals, and the turning light give shape to a collection with no plot. Its mood is double — the hardship and anxiety of the war years are present, but so is a determined reaching back toward pleasure, ordinary comfort, and the small reclaimed satisfactions of daily life.

It is also, quietly, a book of the household. Several pieces turn on Colette's small daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, whom she called Bel-Gazou — a child telling a story to her doll, a child at the cinema — and these are among the tenderest things in the collection. Around them sit ghosts, animals, letters, and the ordinary business of a Paris getting back to life.

The Lighted Room belongs with Colette's other chronicles of the late 1910s and early 1920s, In the Crowd and The Long Hours, and several of its pieces were later moved into other books — a reminder of how freely she rearranged her short prose across her career.

There is no plot. The book collects thirty-one short chronicles, loosely arranged to run across a single year from midsummer to spring. The pieces hold two moods together: the hardship of the war and just-postwar years, and a strong wish to reclaim ordinary pleasure and daily life from it.

Among the chronicles are some of the earliest pieces about Colette's young daughter, Bel-Gazou — a child telling a story to her doll, a child at the cinema — set beside pieces on ghosts, animals, and the small business of a city returning to life. Several of the pieces were later moved into other Colette books.