George Sand
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
The romantic and rebellious novelist George Sand, born in 1804 as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, remains one of France’s most infamous and beloved literary figures. Thanks to a peerless translation by Gretchen van Slyke, Martine Reid’s acclaimed biography of Sand is now available in English.
Drawing on recent French and English biographies of Sand as well as her novels, plays, autobiographical texts, and correspondence, Reid creates the most complete portrait possible of a writer who was both celebrated and vilified. Reid contextualizes Sand within the literature of the nineteenth century, unfolds the meaning and importance of her chosen pen name, and pays careful attention to Sand’s political, artistic, and scientific expressions and interests. The result is a candid, even-handed, and illuminating representation of a remarkable woman in remarkable times.
With its clear, flowing language and impeccable scholarship, this Ernest Montusès Award–winning biography of the author of La Petite Fadette and A Winter in Majorca will be of great interest to those specializing in Sand and nineteenth-century literature—and to readers everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reid, a professor of French language and literature, homes in on the essential threads of author Sand's life and work, and makes a strong case for her continuing relevance. Sand (1804 1876), born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, was famously a cross-dresser and experimented with gender roles throughout her life, not least in adopting a male nom de plume. A celebrity as much for an audacious lifestyle that included numerous affairs (Fr d ric Chopin was one of her paramours) as for her writing, she attempted to embody the French Revolution's ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood in a period of monarchy and repression. While her books, notably including the pastoral novels La Mare au Diable and La Petite Fadette, are not much read today, Reid points out how popular and well-regarded they were in Sand's own time, and defends her romantic idealism in contrast to the more realist vision of writers like Sand's friend Gustave Flaubert. Reid, at least implicitly, raises important questions: how are women who defy social norms treated now, and should more value be placed on literature that envisions a better future? This biography offers an excellent point of entry into Sand's life and thought, encouraging reevaluation of a famed but perhaps underrated author who felt "for humanity... because they are me."
