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Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de FrancueilDupin's first Christian name is sometimes rendered as "Amandine". (; 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pen name George Sand (), was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. Being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She has more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
Like her great-grandmother, Louise Dupin, whom she admired, George Sand advocated for women's rights and passion, criticized the institution of marriage, and fought against the prejudices of a conservative society. She was considered scandalous because of her turbulent love life, her adoption of masculine clothing, and her masculine pseudonym.
While some contemporaries were critical of her comportment, many people accepted her behaviour—until they became shocked with the subversive tone of her novels. Those who found her writing admirable were not bothered by her ambiguous or rebellious public behaviour.
In 1831, at the age of 27, she chose her pseudonym George Sand. "Sand" was derived from the name of her lover and fellow writer Jules Sandeau, as the pair had previously co-authored a novel under the pseudonym J. Sand. She added George to complete the name and distinguish it from Sandeau's, removing the final "s" from the usual French spelling of the name to heighten its ambiguity as a pseudonym.
Victor Hugo commented, "George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother."
Gender appears to be likewise ambiguous in Sand's own perspective. Sometimes when writing first person memoirs or essays (including letters and journals), Sand's language "speaks to modern explorations of gender ambiguity" in the consistent use of a first-person "male persona" Roberts, Michele (13 March 2020) "La parole humaine: Writing, gender and the shifting reputation of George Sand." Times Literary Supplement ( TLS), no. 6102. link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632692903/AONE - via Gale Academic OneFile. used to describe Sand's own experiences and identity in masculine terms. However, when writing an autobiography of the author's youth, the person described is a girl/woman whose descriptions aligns with her legal designation as "la demoiselle Aurora."
Sand's friends and peers likewise alternate between using masculine or female adjectives and pronouns depending on the situation. For instance, in reviewing the collected letters of Sand's lover Chopin,Chopin, Frédéric and Henryk Opieński (1931). Chopin's Letters
Sand had romantic affairs with the novelist Jules Sandeau (1831), the Polish-Russian Prince Norbert Przanowski (February 1832 – Summer 1833) the writer Prosper Mérimée, the dramatist Alfred de Musset (summer 1833 – March 1835), Louis-Chrysostome Michel, the actor Pierre-François Bocage, the writer Charles Didier, the novelist Félicien Mallefille, the politician Louis Blanc, and the composer Frédéric Chopin (1837–1847). Later in her life, she corresponded with Gustave Flaubert, and despite their differences in temperament and aesthetic preference, they eventually became close friends.
Sand was also close friends with the actress Marie Dorval. Whether they were physically involved or not has been debated, yet never verified.. The two met in January 1833, after Sand wrote Dorval a letter of appreciation following one of her performances. Sand wrote about Dorval, including many passages where she is described as smitten with Dorval.
Theater critic Gustave Planche reportedly warned Sand to stay away from Dorval. Likewise, Count Alfred de Vigny, Dorval's lover from 1831 to 1838, warned the actress to stay away from Sand, whom he referred to as "that damned lesbian". In 1840, Dorval played the lead in a play written by Sand, titled Cosima, and the two women collaborated on the script. However, the play was not well-received, and was cancelled after only seven showings. Sand and Dorval remained close friends for the remainder of Dorval's lifetime.
Sand and Chopin also spent many long summers at Sand's country manor in Nohant from 1839 to 1846, skipping only 1840. There, Chopin wrote many of his most famous works, including the Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49, Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 58, and the Ballade No. 3 Op. 47.
In her novel Lucrezia Floriani, Sand is said to have used Chopin as a model for a sickly Eastern European prince named Karol. He is cared for by a middle-aged actress past her prime, Lucrezia, who suffers greatly through her affection for Karol. Though Sand claimed not to have made a cartoon out of Chopin, the book's publication and widespread readership may have exacerbated their later antipathy towards each other. After Chopin's death, Sand burned much of their correspondence, leaving only four surviving letters between the two. Three of the letters were published in the "Classiques Garnier" series in 1968.
Another breach was caused by Chopin's attitude toward Sand's daughter, Solange. Chopin continued to be cordial to Solange after she and her husband Auguste Clésinger fell out with Sand over money. Sand took Chopin's support of Solange to be extremely disloyal, and confirmation that Chopin had always "loved" Solange.From the correspondence of Sand and Chopin:
Sand's son Maurice disliked Chopin. Maurice wanted to establish himself as the "man of the estate" and did not wish to have Chopin as a rival. Maurice removed two sentences from a letter Sand wrote to Chopin when he published it because he felt that Sand was too affectionate toward Chopin and Solange.
Chopin and Sand separated two years before his death for a variety of reasons. Chopin was never asked back to Nohant; in 1848, he returned to Paris from a tour of the United Kingdom, to die at the Place Vendôme in 1849. George Sand was notably absent from his funeral.
In December 1849, Maurice invited the Engraving Alexandre Manceau to celebrate Christmas in Nohant. George Sand fell passionately in love with Manceau, he became her lover, companion and secretary and they stayed together for fifteen years until his death.
Sand died at Nohant, near Châteauroux, in France's Indre département on 8 June 1876, at the age of 71. She was buried in the private graveyard behind the chapel at Nohant-Vic.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 41516). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition. In 2003, plans that her remains be moved to the Panthéon in Paris resulted in controversy.
By the age of 27, Sand was Europe's most popular writer of either gender, more popular than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, and she remained immensely popular as a writer throughout her lifetime and long after her death. Early in her career, her work was in high demand; by 1836, the first of several compendia of her writings was published in 24 volumes. In total, four separate editions of her "Complete Works" were published during her lifetime. In 1880, her children sold the rights to her literary estate for 125,000 Francs (equivalent to 36 kg worth of gold, or 1.3 million dollars in 2015 USD).
Drawing from her childhood experiences of the countryside, Sand wrote the pastoral novels La Mare au Diable (1846), François le Champi (1847–1848), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré (1857). A Winter in Majorca described the period that she and Chopin spent on that island from 1838 to 1839. Her other novels include Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833), Mauprat (1837), Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), Consuelo (1842–1843), and Le Meunier d'Angibault (1845).
Theatre pieces and autobiographical pieces include Histoire de ma vie (1855), Elle et Lui (1859, about her affair with Musset), Journal Intime (posthumously published in 1926), and Correspondence. Sand often performed her theatrical works in her small private theatre at the Nohant estate.
Politically, she became very active after 1841 and the leaders of the day often consulted with her and took her advice. She was a member of the provisional government of 1848, issuing a series of fiery manifestos. While many Republicans were imprisoned or went to exile after Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of December 1851, she remained in France, maintained an ambiguous relationship with the new regime, and negotiated pardons and reduced sentences for her friends.
Sand was known for her implication and writings during the Paris Commune of 1871, where she took a position for the Versailles assembly against the communards, urging them to take violent action against the rebels. She was appalled by the violence of the Paris Commune, writing, "The horrible adventure continues. They ransom, they threaten, they arrest, they judge. They have taken over all the city halls, all the public establishments, they're pillaging the munitions and the food supplies.", edited by Pivot, Sylvain (2003)
Eugène Delacroix was a close friend and respected her literary gifts. Gustave Flaubert was an unabashed admirer. Honoré de Balzac, who knew Sand personally, once said that if someone thought she wrote badly, it was because their own standards of criticism were inadequate. He also noted that her treatment of imagery in her works showed that her writing had an exceptional subtlety, having the ability to "virtually put the image in the word." Alfred de Vigny referred to her as "Sappho".
Not all of her contemporaries admired her or her writing: poet Charles Baudelaire was one contemporary critic of George Sand: "She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women ... The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation."
The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) wrote two poems: "To George Sand: A Desire" (1853) and "To George Sand: A Recognition". The American poet Walt Whitman cited Sand's novel Consuelo as a personal favorite, and the sequel to this novel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, contains at least a couple of passages that appear to have had a very direct influence on him.
In addition to her influences on English and Russian literature, Sand's writing and political views informed numerous 19th century authors in Spain and Latin America, including Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the Cuban-born writer who also published and lived in Spain. Critics have noted structural and thematic similarities between George Sand's Indiana, published in 1832, and Gómez de Avellaneda's anti-slavery novel Sab, published in 1841.
In the first episode of the "Overture" to Swann's Way—the first novel in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time sequence—a young, distraught Marcel is calmed by his mother as she reads from François le Champi, a novel which (it is explained) was part of a gift from his grandmother, which also included La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maîtres Sonneurs. As with many episodes involving art in À la recherche du temps perdu, this reminiscence includes commentary on the work.
Sand is also referred to in Virginia Woolf's book-length essay A Room of One's Own along with George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë as "all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man."Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, Penguin Books, 1929, p. 52; .
Frequent literary references to George Sand appear in (1990) by A. S. Byatt and in the play Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002). George Sand makes an appearance in Isabel Allende's Zorro, going still by her given name, as a young girl in love with Diego de la Vega (Zorro).
Chopin, Sand and her children are the main characters of the theater play by Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz A Summer in Nohant, which premiered in 1930. The play, presenting the final stage of the writer-composer's relationship, was adapted five times by Telewizja Polska: in 1963 (with Antonina Gordon-Górecka as Sand and Gustaw Holoubek as Chopin), in 1972 (with Halina Mikołajska and Leszek Herdegen), in 1980 (with Anna Polony and Michał Pawlicki), in 1999 (with Joanna Szczepkowska, who portrayed Solange in the 1980 version and Piotr Skiba) and in 2021 (with Katarzyna Herman and Marek Kossakowski). Chopin, Sand, and her children are also featured in the 2022 novel “Briefly, A Delicious Life” by Nell Stevens, where they appear as main characters.
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In French:
/ref> one finds her consistently addressed as either "Mme Sand" or more familiarly as "George". Either way, she is referred to with feminine pronouns, and positioned as the "Lady of the House" when referring to their domestic life together. However, when speaking of Sand as a public rather than a private figure, even those who clearly knew (or even referenced) the writer's sex also tended to apply masculine terms when speaking of their role as an author. For instance Jules Janin describes Sand as the king of novelists (ie: "le roi des romanciers modernes") rather than as the queen. Likewise, Flaubert refers to Sand as being a dear master of their shared art (ie: "Chère Maitre"), using a masculine title to denote the masculine professional role, but a grammatically feminine adjective that acknowledges their legal or grammatical sex.
Notable relationships
In 1822, at the age of eighteen, Sand married Casimir Dudevant, an illegitimate son of Baron Jean-François Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice Sand and Solange Dudevant (1828–1899). In 1825, she had an intense but perhaps platonic affair with the young lawyer Aurélien de Sèze. In early 1831, she left her husband and entered upon a four- or five-year period of "romantic rebellion". In 1835, she was legally separated from Dudevant and took custody of their children.
Only those who know how differently we were made can realize how utterly I was in thrall to her...God had given her the power to express what she felt...She was beautiful, and she was simple. She had never been taught anything, but there was nothing she did not know by instinct. I can find no words with which to describe how cold and incomplete my own nature is. I can express nothing. There must be a sort of paralysis in my brain which prevents what I feel from ever finding a form through which it can achieve communication...When she appeared upon the stage, with her drooping figure, her listless gait, her sad and penetrating glance...I can say only that it was as though I were looking at an embodied spirit.
Chopin
Sand spent the winter of 1838–1839 with Frédéric Chopin in Mallorca at the (formerly abandoned) Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa.. The trip to Mallorca was described in her Un hiver à Majorque ( A Winter in Majorca), first published in 1841.Travers, Martin (ed.), European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice. Continuum publishing, 2006, p. 97. Chopin was already ill with incipient tuberculosis at the beginning of their relationship, and spending a cold and wet winter in Mallorca where they could not get proper lodgings exacerbated his symptoms.''.|left]]
Last years and death
George Sand had no choice but to write for the theater because of financial difficulties. In Nohant, she even exercised the functions of village doctor, having studied anatomy and herbal remedies with a Doctor Deschartres. But she was not confined to Nohant, and travelled in France, and in particular with her great friend at the Château du Petit Coudray, or abroad. In 1864, Sand took residence in Palaiseau together with her beloved Manceau for a couple of months, where she tended him in his decline.
Career and politics
Sand's first literary efforts were collaborations with the writer Jules Sandeau. They published several stories together, signing them Jules Sand. Sand's first published novel Rose et Blanche (1831) was written in collaboration with Sandeau. She subsequently adopted, for her first independent novel, Indiana (1832), the pen name that made her famous – George Sand. ()|left|228x228px]]
Political views
Sand also wrote literary criticism and political texts. In her early life, she sided with the poor and working class as well as championing women's rights. When the 1848 Revolution began, she was an ardent republican. Sand started her own newspaper, published in a workers' co-operative.
Criticism
Sand's writing was immensely popular during her lifetime and she was highly respected by the literary and cultural elite in France. Victor Hugo, in the eulogy he gave at her funeral, said "the lyre was within her."
Influences on literature
Fyodor Dostoevsky "read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand" and translated her La dernière Aldini in 1844, only to learn that it had already been published in Russian.Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 71; . In his mature period, he expressed an ambiguous attitude towards her. For instance, in his novella Notes from Underground, the narrator refers to sentiments he expresses as, "I launch off at that point into European, inexplicably lofty subtleties à la George Sand".Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Project Gutenberg.
In film
George Sand is portrayed by Merle Oberon in A Song to Remember, by Patricia Morison in Song Without End, by Rosemary Harris in Notorious Woman, by Judy Davis in James Lapine's 1991 British-American film Impromptu; and by Juliette Binoche in the 1999 French film Children of the Century (Les Enfants du siècle). Les Enfants du siècle (2000) at the British Film Institute Also in George Who? (French: George qui?), a 1973 French biographical film directed by Michèle Rosier and starring Anne Wiazemsky as George Sand, Alain Libolt and Denis Gunsbourg. In the 2002 Polish film directed by Jerzy Antczak George Sand is portrayed by Danuta Stenka. In the French film Flashback directed by Caroline Vigneaux, George Sand is portrayed by Suzanne Clément. George Sand is also portrayed by Nine D'Urso in the 2025 TV series . The show portrays an intimate relationship between D'Urso and Barbara Pravi (who plays Marie Dorval).
Works
Novels
Plays
See also
Citations
General and cited sources
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1804 Births, 1876 Deaths, 19th-century French Composers, 19th-century French Dramatists And Playwrights, 19th-century French Novelists, 19th-century French Women Writers, Frédéric Chopin, French Women Novelists, French Socialists, Legion Of Honour Refusals, People From Indre, Pseudonymous Women Writers, Writers From Paris, 19th-century French Letter Writers, 19th-century Pseudonymous Writers, Romantic Muses And Models, French Women Dramatists And Playwrights, Writers Of The Romantic Era, 19th-century French Women Journalists, 19th-century French Short Story Writers, French Women Short Story Writers, French Political Writers, 19th-century French Non-fiction Writers, French Women Non-fiction Writers, 19th-century French Memoirists, French Women's Rights Activists, French Travel Writers, Female-to-male Cross-dressers, French Historical Novelists, Writers Of Historical Fiction Set In The Early Modern Period, French Literary Critics, French Autobiographers, French Newspaper Founders, French Newspaper Editors, French Women Newspaper Editors, French Anti-poverty Advocates, French Baronesses, Gustave Flaubert
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