George Sand
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- $38.99
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- $38.99
Publisher Description
George Sand was the most famous—and most scandalous—woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific—she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange.
Drawing on archival sources—much of it neglected by Sand’s previous biographers—Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand’s writing and defined her life. Why was Sand’s relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women’s liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand’s identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand’s mother and grandmother, and Sand’s own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Danielle Steele would be hard-pressed to concoct a juicer tale than the scandalous life of 19th-century French writer George Sand (1804 1876), revisited in this perceptive and original biography by novelist Harlan (Footfalls, Watershed). Sand, n e Aurore Dupin, left her husband and two children in provincial France and successfully launched herself as a self-supporting writer in Paris, donning men's clothing to ease passage into the professional world and taking a pseudonym to protect her aristocratic family's name. Sand took on many lovers, among them poet Alfred de Musset and composer Fr d ric Chopin. Yet despite Sand's outward daring, as Harlan shows, she obsessed over her identity, as both a woman and an aristocrat. Based on her interpretation of Sand's letters, Harlan says that this question of identity is at the root of Sand's compulsively prolific writing, which produced scores of novels and plays, and 20,000 letters. Sand may indeed not have been her nobleman father's biological daughter, and her mother was from the lower classes. So, "with a tendency toward self-contradiction," she bounced ambivalently between ideals of feminine submission and emancipation, and sometimes obscured, sometimes flaunted her lineage. Harlan sensitively analyzes the gaps and idiosyncrasies in her subject's heavily self-edited correspondence, autobiography and novels to uncover a fresh portrait of this volatile, imaginative woman of letters. B&w illus.
