The Other One

The setup is a familiar triangle — wife, husband, mistress under one roof — and Colette uses it to look past the man entirely. Farou is a charming, productive, self-absorbed playwright whose infidelities are a settled fact of his marriage. Fanny, his wife, is comfortable and unsuspicious until the affair with Jane, his indispensable secretary, becomes undeniable.[1]

What follows is not a war between the women. The novel's real subject is the recognition that passes between Fanny and Jane: two people who know Farou better than he knows himself, and who value the household, the routine, and each other more than they value winning him. La Seconde — the second woman — names Jane's role, but the book is about how little that role finally divides them.[1]

The Other One belongs to Colette's mature period, when she wrote about desire and marriage with a cool, unsentimental intelligence. Its refusal of melodrama, and its interest in what women owe and give each other inside an arrangement built around a man, make it feel strikingly modern.[1]

Fanny is the settled, easygoing wife of Farou, a busy and successful playwright whose affairs she knows about in full — he writes to her from tour about the actress he is sleeping with, and she reads the letter aloud at lunch. Jane, poised and efficient, is his secretary and a fixture of the household, useful to Fanny and devoted to the family's smooth running. The three live together with Farou's adolescent son, Jean, in a comfortable domestic machine that Jane largely keeps oiled.[1]

When Fanny can no longer avoid knowing that Jane is also Farou's lover, the novel withholds the expected explosion. Fanny's first fury gives way to a colder, more searching appraisal — of Farou, of Jane, and of what she actually wants to protect. Between the two women a strange candor opens up, in which each sees the other clearly and neither is quite the enemy the situation seems to require.[1]