Henry Gauthier-Villars

Henry Gauthier-Villars, who wrote as Willy, ran a factory of ghostwriters, published his wife's Claudine novels under his own name, and is remembered almost entirely as the man who exploited Colette. He came from a family of scientific publishers, was a music critic of real influence - an early champion of Wagner and of Debussy - and a ubiquitous figure in Paris literary life, with a gift for publicity that would now be called branding. The novels, articles and reviews signed Willy were largely written by others: he commissioned, edited, added the jokes, and paid a flat fee, and at least a dozen writers worked for him. Colette, whom he married in 1893 when she was twenty and he thirty-four, produced Claudine a l'ecole and its sequels under this arrangement; the books were the sensation of the decade, and he sold the rights outright so that she got nothing from them for the rest of her life. She wrote later that he locked her in a room to work, which he denied and which is generally believed. They divorced in 1910. He continued publishing, went bankrupt, and ended dependent on a small pension. The literary judgement on him has hardened steadily, though the Claudine books do bear his editorial marks and the collaboration was not quite as simple as the standard account. Among his ghostwriters were Paul-Jean Toulet and Curnonsky, later famous as a food writer. He was an early defender of Dreyfus. Colette put him into her later books repeatedly and never with affection.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history