Colette’s work is interesting on two levels; in her depiction of the artistic demi-monde she mingled with, with their breaking of nineteenth century moral conventions and in the love she felt for nature.


Generally, her novels revolve around a sensuality which reconciles the Decadents’ intellectualized sexuality with the vibrant sensual experiences of rural life; an awareness of animals and the smells and colours associated with the changing seasons.


Although The Ripening Seed seems to be the straightforward love story of two adolescents facing the difficulties of becoming a couple, it is actually a subtle essay on the ambiguity of sexual identity. Philippe and Vinca have sworn undying love to each other, but as the summer holidays draw to an end Philippe is torn between his growing sexual curiosity and the desire to recapture the innocence of childhood.


He lets himself be seduced by an enigmatic older woman. His dilemma is not lost on Vinca, whose boyish beauty shines in contrast to the artificial femme fatale. Colette creates a tension between the conventionality of the adolescents’ thoughts and the ambivalence and vulnerability their behaviour reveals: Philippe is sensitive and introspective, Vinca is a tomboy who comes across as a blending of smells, colours and plants, her hair is thick as straw, her eyes blue as the periwinkle, her body smells like crushed green corn and her tanned skin is the brown of farmhouse bread.


Colette captures precisely the clumsiness of youth but The Ripening Seed is not an idyllic portrayal of innocent love. Appearing first as a newspaper serial publication was halted because it is Vinca the girl who instigates the sexual consummation of the relationship. In The Ripening Seed Colette goes beyond stereotyped ideas about youth and age just as she goes beyond gender stereotypes to portray the complexities of obsessive love and sexual passion.

‘It never occurred to him that it might be possible to perfect the give-and-take of an act of pleasure so clumsily performed. He was driven by the idealism of his tender age to salvage only what he knew must not be allowed to perish: his fifteen enchanted years of single-minded affection, their fifteen years together as pure and loving twins.’ p119