The novel is about the separation of Cheri and his lover of six years, the much older Lea de Lonval. The two believe their relationship is casual until they are separated by Cheri's marriage. It is only then that they realize they have been in love.
Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving - New York Times
Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental... Very beautiful and subtle... I feel more alive when I read her -- Helen Simpson - Guardian
Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur - The Times
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