Catherine Colomb has long been considered one of the most original writers of twentieth-century Switzerland. Except for stays, in her youth, in Weimar, Potsdam, Berlin, Paris and London (where she met members of the Bloomsbury Circle), Colomb spent her entire life in the canton of Vaud, living in Yverdon-les-Bains, Lausanne and Prilly. It is known that she read Balzac, Hölderlin, Jean Paul and especially Proust, as well as, late in life, Virginia Woolf. But she fashioned her exceptional style and formally innovative fictions in relative isolation.