The Last Love of George Sand
A Literary Biography
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
George Sand is one the most celebrated writers and controversial personalities of nineteenth-century France; she is as famous for her bohemian lifestyle as for her written work. The Last Love of George Sand portrays the writer, political activist, and cultural figure as she starts a new chapter in her ever-surprising life: the mature years with her last lover, the young and talented engraver Alexandre Manceau.
A turning point came for George Sand in 1849. After her political involvement in the revolution of 1848, Sand retreated to her country property, Nohant, with her son Maurice and started writing new plays. One day, Maurice introduced her to Alexandre Manceau, a young and shy artist thirteen years her junior. At forty-five, she was at the pinnacle of her career. She had a long history of tumultuous love affairs with famous artists such as Musset, Chopin, and Mérimée, but she had never experienced a peaceful and balanced relationship. With Manceau, Sand discovered that she could be loved, and fall in love herself, without drama. Their relationship would last fifteen years, and prove to be the most prolific period of Sand's life, with fifty books published including the novels Elle et lui, inspired by her relationship with Musset, and Le dernier amour, written just ten days after Manceau died of tuberculosis.
Although much has been written about George Sand, most of the previous biographies are focused on her more turbulent times. In The Last Love of George Sand, Evelyne Bloch-Dano looks back on Sand's life from the vantage point of her years with Manceau.
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer whose work was often compared to that of Flaubert, Stendahl, and Balzac, George Sand had her choice of celebrity lovers (among them Chopin and M rim e) but found "the man of her dreams" in a relatively unknown artist who was 13 years her junior, as this impassioned biography contends. That man was Alexandre Manceau, an engraver who was friends with Sand's son, Maurice, and who moved in 1849 to Nohant, where a dispirited Sand was recovering from the failed revolution of 1848. Focusing on the years 1849 to 1865 (the year of Manceau's death), Bloch-Dano (Madame Proust) uses the couple's experiences as touchstones for exploring key aspects of Sand's life: her gloomy first marriage; her relationship with her son and daughter, Solange; the salon society of leading literati and Continental artists to which she belonged; her bohemian lifestyle; her fervent support of the Republic; and her prodigious literary output. During these years, Sand published a staggering 26 novels and 20 plays, many of them facilitated by Manceau's involvement in her life. Bloch-Dano brings Sand vividly to life through a wealth of quoted letters and memoirs, though somewhat at the expense of Manceau, who never really emerges from Sand's shadow. Charette's translation is serviceable, though sometimes clich d. Nevertheless, readers who know Sand largely through her outsized literary reputation will find this portrait of her as a love-smitten romantic intriguing. The French Publishers's Agency.
