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A demimondaine with a shocking reputation, by the time of her death, in 1954, Colette was an institution, the first French woman of letters ever honored with a state funeral.

Smaller but scene-stealing walk-on parts go to woman of letters Mary McCarthy, philosopher Hannah Arendt, journalist Murray Kempton, poets June Jordan and Sterling Brown, composer Virgil Thomson, and novelists James Baldwin and Norman Mailer.

His parents, Sir William Wilde, a distinguished eye surgeon, and his mother, a noted woman of letters nicknamed Speranza, hosted Dublin’s leading artistic salon.

Svay’s script for “Woman of Letters” was all telling and little showing, feelings announced more than enacted, but Ugay’s washes of evocative cinematic color somewhat cushioned the explicitness.

But she chose, with an energy and a purpose not made less admirable by the taut stylishness with which she accomplished it, to become what she admired: a novelist, a working reporter, a biographer, a leading feminist, a woman of letters, an honest and unsparing and tender memoirist.