Colette

Colette's first husband, the writer Henry Gauthier-Villars, published her early Claudine novels under his own pen name 'Willy' and reportedly locked her in a room until she produced pages. She left him in 1906 and supported herself for years as a music-hall mime and dancer, a scandalous career that included openly acknowledged relationships with women, before returning to writing under her own name.

She married twice more; during the Nazi occupation she hid her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, who was Jewish, from arrest inside their Paris apartment. Gigi, the novella of a courtesan's education that became her best-known late work, appeared in 1944. She was the first woman elected president of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died in 1954 the Catholic Church denied her religious rites over her divorces, so the state gave her France's first funeral for a woman of letters instead.