The French novelist Colette (1873-1954) has been widely praised for the vividness of her language. But many critics complain that her novels are indifferent to important moral questions. This charge is unfair. Each of her novels is a poetic condensation of a major emotional crisis in the life of an ordinary person of her time. Such emotional crises almost invariably raise important moral questions.
A novel that poetically condenses a major emotional crisis does not have to be indifferent to the important moral questions raised by that crisis is an assumption on which the argument depends.