Becoming George Sand
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A married woman’s affair makes her reconsider the nature of love in this “beautiful, wise novel” (Edmund White).
Maria Jameson is having an affair—a passionate, life-changing affair. Yet she wonders whether this has to mean an end to the love she shares with her husband.
For answers to the question of whether it is possible to love two men at once, she reaches across the centuries to George Sand, the maverick French novelist. Immersing herself in the life of this revolutionary woman who took numerous lovers, Maria struggles with the choices women make, and wonders if women in the nineteenth century might have been more free, in some ways, than their twenty-first-century counterparts.
As these two narratives intertwine—following George through her affair with Frédéric Chopin, following Maria through her affair with an Irish professor—this novel explores the personal and the historical, the demands of self and the mysteries of the heart.
“This is not so much a story about having a love affair as it is a study of the nature of love itself. I was absolutely knocked out by it.” —Elizabeth Berg
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maria Jameson, happy in her life as a professor, wife, and mother, finds her life upended when she begins an affair with a man she meets in a shabby Edinburgh, Scotland, bookshop. To help her make sense of her situation, Maria also embarks on a project researching the life and art of French novelist George Sand, who made a name for herself by walking around in trousers and taking beaucoup lovers. As the dry narrative advances, Brackenbury cuts back and forth between Maria's story and Sand's fateful trip to Majorca with Chopin, allowing Maria to discovers deep kinship with the writer, based on the conflicting desires of the female heart. Indeed, Maria's affair makes her life complete; she is happy with her lover and with her family, but the arrangement can't possibly last. While Brackenbury finds some nice parallels and a telling subplot regarding an ailing friend of Maria's, Maria's story of disconnection and reconnection with her family moves slowly, and the interludes in Sand's era often come off as stiff. Maria is deeply interested in her conundrum; readers will be much less so.
