Laure: The Collected Writings
Born in Paris in 1903 to an affluent, conservative Catholic family, Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot rebelled against her bourgeois background. Using the moniker Laure, she recreated herself, adopting a decadent lifestyle, radical politics and an anguished voice for her poetry, prose and essays. Published in English for the first time, these are the collected works of a marginal figure associated with better-known writers and political dissidents of the Parisian avant-garde between the wars. Laure worked for and financed the leftist journal La Critique sociale, which published some of Georges Bataille's most important essays as well as those of other surrealists and Marxists. At 31, she began an intense affair with Bataille, dying in his home four years later of tuberculosis. Laure destroyed much of her writing that, had it survived, might have made this collection a more coherent, cohesive whole. As it is, the book would have benefited from more historical background and explanatory material to aid the general reader. The interest here lies more in how Laure's letters, poems, political essays and journal entries capture the essence of an era and reveal a tortured, self-conscious artist who never had a chance to mature.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.