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Shop nowLa Vagabonde
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreLargely autobiographical, La Vagabonde recalls the author’s own years as a dance-hall performer in turn-of-the-century Paris. Colette takes the listener backstage and into the demimonde of Renée Néré, an aging dancer, mime, and failed writer. In a sultry, passionate, and intelligent voice, Renée narrates the story of her romance with an admirer named Maxime. Her struggle is that of a woman who must choose between freedom and love.
Sidonie Colette (1873–1954), French literary genius, wrote over fifty novels amid a life of scandal. Her first husband took credit for her early works, but then she achieved fame as the author of such works as Chéri and Gigi. Along the way she had an affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson and caused a riot kissing her lesbian lover onstage. Her third husband was arrested by the Gestapo. She was the first woman to be given an official state funeral by France.
Johanna Ward (a.k.a. Kate Reading) is an Audie Award–winning narrator and has received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. She is also a theater actor in the Washington, DC, area and has been a member of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, among others. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.
Reviews
“[An] enchanting, sincere, and beautifully constructed novel…[Colette’s] hoarse cry of loss voices the complex anguish of our time.”
“A rousing novel of love and guile, of vulnerability and vituperative wit, of poetry and self-emporwerment, a slim volume scored with little wisdoms, sumptuous descriptions and the ‘heroic vanity’ of an unforgettable cast.”
“Renee Nere, the forthright narrator…is a woman in her thirties whose fractured identity is central to her existence. She has written books, divorced her husband, gone on the stage. Yet her hold on her newfound independence is transparently shaky. Struggle as she may, she is torn between the longing for independence and the need for love. It is this, really—the Question of Love—that we soon see commands Renee’s real attention.”
“Ward presents the controlled, but deep, emotion of this woman struggling to release the pain and frustration of an abusive first marriage and to enjoy the almost painfully awkward ardor of her suitor.”
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