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George Sand (1804-1876) - Pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin |
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French Romantic writer, who questioned the sexual identity and gender destinies in fiction. Outside the literary realm, George Sand was noted for her numerous love affairs with such prominent figures as Prosper Merimée, Alfred de Musset (1833-34), Frédéric Chopin, (1838-47), Alexandre Manceau (1849-65), and others. The painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) did not take Sand very seriously, but her work inspired Alexander Herzen and Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand. Widespread critical attention accompanied the publication of most of her novels, starting from Indiana (1832), a story of a naive, love-starved woman abused by her much older husband and deceived by a selfish seducer. From early childhood, I needed to fashion my own inner world, a poetic and fantastic world. Little by little I needed also to make it religious or philosophical, that is to say, moral or sentimental. Around the age of eleven, I read The Iliad and Jerusalem Delivered. Ah! how quickly I devoured them, how frustrated when I came to the last page! I grew sad and as if stricken with grief to see them end so soon. I did not know what to do next; I could not read anything else; I could not tell which of the two poems was my favorite; I understood that Homer's was the more beautiful, the greater, the more direct one; but Tasso's intrigued and provoked me more. I was more romantic, more apt to appeal to my time and my sex. (from Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, a group translation, edited by Thelma Jurgrau, critical introduction by Thelma Jurgrau, historical introduction by Walter D. Gray, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 603) George Sand was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris and
brought up in the country home of her grandmother. Her father, Maurice
Dupin, was a military officer; he died from a riding accident in 1808.
Sand received education at Nohant, her grandmother's estate, and at
Couvent des Anglaises, Paris (1817-20). When she died, Sand inherited five hundred thousand francs and the house. In order to have control over the inheritamce, she married in 1822 François Casimir Dudevant, to whom she bore one son, Maurice, and one daughter, Solange. Casimir Dudevant was the illegitimate son of baron Jean-François Dudevant. In 1821 Sand inherited Nohant after the death of her grandmother. Because of her unhappy marriage, she left her family in 1831 and returned to Paris. In 1831 Sand started to write for Le Figaro. She contributed Revue des Deux Mondes (1832-41) and La République (1848), and was a coeditor of Revue Indépendante (1841). During these years she had acquaintance with several poets, artists, philosophers, and politicians. With her lover Jules Sandeau she wrote in a few weeks a novel, Rose et Blanche, under the pseudonym Jules Sand. The second novel Indiana (1832), published under the pseudonym G. Sand, was written by herself and gained an immediate fame. It was followed by Valentine (1832), and Lélia (1833). While having a brief affair with the young writer Prosper Mérimée, she also had a romantic relationship with the actress Marie Dorval. A rumor began to spread that the Sand-Mérimée affair lasted only one night and was consummated on the seat of a carriage during a ride through Paris. In his novel, La Double Méprise (1833, The Double Mistake), Mérimée gave a fictionalized account of their tryst. Upon reading Indiana the poet Alfred de Musset sent an admiring letter to Sand which marked the beginning of their passionate liaison. Musset immortalized it in The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836), in which Sand was cast as Brigitte Pierson. After breaking with him, she cut off her long hair and sent some to Musset. In Delacroix's portrait from this period her thick, dark hair, is cropped short around her oval face. Heinrich Heine said that "the features of George Sand bear rather the impress of a Greek regularity. Their form, however, is not hard, but softened by the sentimentality which is suffused over them like a veil of sorrow." He also added that she never said anything witty; she was one of the most unwitty Frenchwomen he knew. At
the age of 33 Sand started an affair with Chopin. Sand
herself was not musical, but according to Liszt, she possessed taste
and judgment. However, Heine joked that she sang "at best with the
bravura of a beautiful grisette who has not yet breakfasted or happens
not to be in good voice." Chopin did not first consider her
attractive. "Something about her repels me," he confessed to his
family. One of Chopin's famous preludes, nicknamed the 'Raindrop,' is
said to have been suggested by rain dripping through the roof of the
Carthusian monastery in Valldemossa, Mallorca, where they were staying
in the winter of 1838-1839. The relationship ended in 1847 when Sand started to suspect that Chopin had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange. It is also possible, that behind the breakup was Sand's treatment of Solange; she had married the sculptor Auguste Clésinger in 1847 and turned against her mother with him. Chopin was on Solange's side. Delacroix's famous double portrait of Chopin and Sand was painted in 1838. A vandal slashed it in 1870, thereby creating two canvases. Sand's early writings show the influence of the writers with whom she was associated. In the 1830s several artists responded to the call of the Comte de Saint-Simon of cure the evils of the new industrial society, among them Franz Listz and Sand who became friends, not lovers. On a personal level, Michel de Bourges, who preached revolution, was more important for her view of society. After de Bourges came Pierre Leroux, who was against property and supported the equality of women, and wanted to rehabilitate Satan. When François Buloz refused to publish her novel in Revues des Deux Monder, Sand founded in 1840 with Pierre Leroux and Louis Viardot a new review, La Révue indépendante. From the 1840s Sand found her own voice in novels, which had roots in her childhood's peasant milieu. For the rest of her life, Sand was committed to ideal of Socialism, which his friend Flaubert rejected in their dispute. Sand's positive review of Flaubert's novel Salammbô (1862) had led to correspondence and friendship between these two very different writers, but eventually Sand's idealism and Flaubert's pessimism brought them into a collision. After
the 1848 revolution in France failed, Sand settled
disappointed at Nohant. From 1864 to 1867 she lived in Palaiseau, near
Versailles. Besides writing, Sand also enjoyed traveling. "Work is not
man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength, his glory and his
pleasure." George Sand died on June 8, 1876, in Nohant. Her last words
were: "Leave the plot green, and do not cover the grave with bricks or
stone." Sand played an important, if long underestimated, role in the evolution of the novel. Her books, although popular, awoke also controversy: the French Senate recognized its opposition to the presence of Sand's works in public libraries. Partly because of affairs with well-known celebrities, she was accused of lesbianism and nymphomania. In her mid-life autobiography, Histoire de ma viev (1854-55, Story of My Life), Sand displaced conventional distinctions separating male from female, fact from fiction, and public from private life. "Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness." Sand often dressed as a man. When she was young, Sand wore boys's clothes to go shooting. In her autobiography she said: "So, I had a "sentry box redingote" made for myself, out of thick gray cloth, with matching trousers and vest. With a gray hat and a wide wool tie, I was the perfet little first-year student. I cannot tell you the pleasure I derived from my boots—I would gladly have slept in them, as my brother did in his youth, when he put on his first pair. With those little iron heels, I felt secure on the sidewalks. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could have made a trip around the world. Also, my clothing made me fearless. I was on the go in all kinds of weather, I came in at all hours, I sat in the pit in every theatre. No one paid attention to me, no one suspected my disguise." (from Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, p. 893) In Consuelo (1843),
which revolves around the musical world of the period, the gifted
heroine, a singer, defies the tragic destiny depicted in Madame de
Staël's Corinne (1807). Its sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) have been called a feminine bildungsroman, the French Wilhelm Meister. The
novels are peopled with a parade of historical figures ranging from the
composers Nicola Porpora and Joseph Haydn to the famous castrato
Cafferelli, Frederick the Great, and Adam Weishaupt.
During the 1840s, Sand was obsessed with secret societies and the
occult history of humanity. To a friend she wrote that "the history of
these mysteries, I believe, can never be carried out except in the form
of a novel". At the end of La Comtesse de Rudolstadt Consuelo
is initiated into the Order of the Invisibles, a kind of übersociety of
secret societies. In the foreword to the 1867 edition of Le Compagnon du Tour de France,
which first came out in 1840, she argued that "since inequality reigns
in empires, equality has necessarily needed to seek the shadows
and mystery in order to work toward its divine goal".Several of Sand's acquaintances were Freemasons. Sand's other works include her countryside novels La mare au diable (1846), in which Germain, a young widower, must choose between a rich woman and a poor girl, François le Champi (1847-48), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853). In Lucrezia Floriani (1846) Sand depicted her relationship with Frédéric Chopin (Prince Karol de Roswald in the book). Horace (1842) was an examination of the young generation enthused by the ideals of Romanticism. She also wrote memoirs, short stories, essays and fairy tales. Elle et lui (1859), a triangle drama, reflected her romance with Musset, who answered with Lui et elle, in which he defended his brother. Louise Colet continued the literary battle with Lui (1860). In 1842, the English critic George Henry Lewes said that Sand was ''the most remarkable writer of the present century.'' However, Sand's literary reputation started to decline after her death, and in the beginning of the 20th century, her work did not attract much attention. "The world will know and understand me someday," Sand once wrote to her critics. "But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women." For further reading: Family Romances: George Sand's Early Novels by Kathryn J. Crecelius (1987); George Sand: A Brave Man, the Most Womanly Woman by Donna Dickenson (1988); George Sand by David Powell (1990); Le Personnage sandien: Constantes et varitations by Anna Szabo (1991); George Sand: Writing for Her Life by Isabelle Hoog Naginski (1991); Poétiques de la parabole by Michèle Hecquet (1992); George Sand and Idealism by Naomi Schor (1993); Romantic Vision by Robert Godwin-Jones (1995); George Sand et l'écriture du roman by Jeanne Goldin (1996); De l'être en lettres by Anne McCall Saint-Saëns (1996); George Sand by Nicole Mozet (1997); George Sand by Elizabeth Harlan (2004); Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias (2016); George Sand by Martine Reid, translated with an introduction by Gretchen van Slyke (2017); 'George Sand,' in Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore by Terry Newman (2018); 'George Sand,' in Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 by Jonathan Beecher (2021); George Sand et la Commune de Paris: des jours sans lendemain by Georges Buisson (2021); George Sand: No to Prejudice by Ysabelle Lacamp; translated by Emma Ramadan (2023 - Note: Diane Kurys's film Enfants du siècle (1999), starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, depicted the love affair of Alfred de Musset and George Sand. Selected works:
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