George Sand

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin was born in Paris on July 1, 1804, weeks after her parents' hasty marriage ^[1]. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was an officer in Napoleon's army and a great grandson of Maurice de Saxe, the celebrated marshal of France, which gave the family a thread of aristocratic descent. Her mother, Sophie Victoire Delaborde, was the daughter of a Parisian bird seller. The mismatch between these two worlds, one titled and propertied, the other plebeian and precarious, marked Aurore's childhood and later fed her sympathy for ordinary people ^[2].

Maurice Dupin died in a riding accident in 1808, when Aurore was four. Custody of the child passed, after painful negotiation, to her paternal grandmother, Marie Aurore de Saxe, who raised her at the family estate of Nohant in the Berry region of central France ^[1]. Nohant became the fixed point of her existence: she absorbed the speech, songs, and customs of the Berrichon peasantry, material she would mine for decades. Her grandmother, a cultivated woman of the Enlightenment, supervised an education that included music, literature, and natural history.

From 1818 to 1820 she boarded at the convent of the English Augustinians in Paris, where she passed through a period of intense religious feeling ^[2]. Back at Nohant she read Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and the philosophers in her grandmother's library, rode horses across the countryside in male dress for practicality, and, on her grandmother's death in 1821, inherited the estate. In 1822, aged eighteen, she married Casimir Dudevant, the natural son of a baron. The couple had a son, Maurice, in 1823 and a daughter, Solange, in 1828, but the marriage soured quickly; Casimir's tastes ran to hunting and wine, hers to books and ideas ^[1].

In January 1831 Aurore Dudevant left Nohant for Paris under an arrangement that allowed her long stays in the capital while Casimir kept the estate. She needed income and chose journalism, joining the satirical paper Le Figaro under the editor Henri de Latouche and collaborating on fiction with a young writer from Berry, Jules Sandeau ^[2]. Their joint work appeared under the signature J. Sand. To move freely and cheaply through the city, she adopted men's clothing, a redingote, trousers, and boots, and took up smoking, habits that soon became part of her public identity ^[3].

Her first solo novel, Indiana, appeared in May 1832 under a new name of her own: George Sand ^[1]. The book, the story of a Creole woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man, was an immediate success and was read as an attack on the Napoleonic Code's subjection of wives. Critics debated whether its author could really be a woman. She followed it within months with Valentine, and in 1833 with Lélia, a daring novel of female disillusionment and desire that provoked outrage and cemented her notoriety ^[2].

Anyone asking who was George Sand in the mid 1830s would have received a vivid answer from the Parisian press: a woman who wrote like a man, dressed like a man, earned her own living, and said openly that marriage as constituted was a form of servitude. In 1835 she began legal proceedings against Casimir, and in 1836 the courts granted her a separation that restored Nohant and custody arrangements for the children ^[1]. Few women of her generation fought such a battle in public and won.

Sand's productivity was enormous. Over roughly forty five years she published more than seventy novels along with plays, tales, travel writing, criticism, and political journalism, and her collected correspondence runs to some 25 volumes in Georges Lubin's modern edition ^[4]. Among George Sand achievements, contemporaries singled out her range: gothic and idealist novels such as Consuelo (1842 to 1843), set in the musical world of eighteenth century Venice and Bohemia, sat alongside socialist novels like Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840) and Le Meunier d'Angibault (1845) ^[2].

Her most durable fiction came from Berry. The rural novels, La Mare au diable (1846), François le Champi (1847 to 1848), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853), portrayed peasant life with a seriousness French literature had rarely granted it, and generations of French schoolchildren later read them as classics ^[1]. Proust's narrator in In Search of Lost Time recalls his grandmother giving him François le Champi, a sign of the place these books held in bourgeois households ^[5].

Sand was also a political actor. A committed republican influenced by the Christian socialism of Pierre Leroux and the abbé de Lamennais, she co-founded the Revue indépendante with Leroux in 1841 ^[2]. When revolution toppled the July Monarchy in February 1848, she threw herself into the new republic's cause, writing government circulars and founding the short lived paper La Cause du peuple; she declined suggestions that she stand as a candidate, arguing that civil rights for women had to precede political ones ^[3]. After Louis Napoléon's coup of December 1851 she used a personal audience with the new ruler to plead for imprisoned and exiled republicans, and a number of sentences were commuted ^[1]. Her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, published serially in 1854 and 1855, remains one of the major self portraits of the century ^[4].

Sand's private life was scrutinized as intensely as her books. After her separation from Casimir Dudevant she formed a series of attachments that the newspapers of two continents followed. Her affair with the poet Alfred de Musset, begun in 1833, included a disastrous journey to Venice in 1833 and 1834 during which both fell ill and the relationship collapsed; each later wrote about it, Musset in La Confession d'un enfant du siècle and Sand in Elle et lui (1859) ^[2].

Her longest and most famous relationship was with the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. They met in 1836 through Franz Liszt's circle and were companions from 1838 until 1847 ^[6]. Their winter of 1838 to 1839 on Majorca, spent partly in the abandoned Carthusian monastery at Valldemossa while Chopin's health deteriorated, became legendary; Sand recounted it acidly in Un hiver à Majorque (1842). For most of a decade Chopin spent summers at Nohant, where he composed a large share of his mature work. The bond broke amid family conflict involving Sand's daughter Solange and her husband, the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, and the two never reconciled before Chopin's death in 1849 ^[6].

Nohant itself was the steadiest relationship of her life. She ran the estate, staged plays in its private theater, and received a stream of guests that included Liszt, Balzac, Delacroix, Turgenev, and Flaubert ^[3]. From around 1850 until her death her household companion was the engraver Alexandre Manceau, thirteen years her junior, a devoted partner who served as her secretary until his death in 1865 ^[1]. Her friendship with Gustave Flaubert, conducted largely by letter from 1866 onward, produced one of the great literary correspondences in French, the skeptical hermit of Croisset sparring affectionately with the woman he addressed as chère maître ^[4].

The failure of the Second Republic and the bloodshed of June 1848 tempered Sand's revolutionary hopes, and under the Second Empire she withdrew largely to Berry, though she kept writing at her habitual pace of a novel or more a year ^[2]. The theater absorbed much of her energy: her stage adaptation of François le Champi succeeded in Paris in 1849, and plays such as Le Marquis de Villemer (1864) drew large audiences ^[1].

In her sixties she settled into the role the French press called la bonne dame de Nohant, the good lady of Nohant. She gardened, botanized, wrote tales for her granddaughters Aurore and Gabrielle, published the Contes d'une grand mère, and kept up her immense correspondence ^[3]. The Franco Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871 distressed her deeply; she condemned both the war and the Commune's violence in her journal writings, disappointing some old comrades on the left ^[2].

She remained productive to the end, with late novels such as Nanon (1872) revisiting the French Revolution through a peasant heroine's eyes. In late May 1876 she fell gravely ill with an intestinal blockage, and she died at Nohant on June 8, 1876, a few weeks short of her seventy second birthday ^[1]. She was buried in the small family cemetery beside the house. Flaubert wept at the funeral, and Victor Hugo sent a eulogy declaring that France mourned an immortal ^[5].

Sand's reputation dipped in the decades after her death, when critics filed her under sentimental idealism, but readers never entirely abandoned her, and the twentieth century reversed the verdict. Feminist scholarship from the 1970s onward re-examined her novels, her autobiography, and her correspondence as central documents in the history of women's writing, and Lubin's edition of the letters revealed a mind engaged with nearly every current of her age ^[4]. Writers as different as Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Whitman, and Proust acknowledged her influence ^[5].

Her houses keep her memory in public view. Nohant is preserved by the French state as the Maison de George Sand, open to visitors, with the theater and her writing rooms intact ^[7]. The monastery cell at Valldemossa on Majorca draws travelers retracing the winter with Chopin. In 2004, the bicentennial of her birth, France mounted national commemorations, and a proposal to transfer her remains to the Panthéon was debated, though her family and many admirers preferred to leave her at Nohant ^[3].

The basic George Sand facts, more than seventy novels, a landmark autobiography, a legal battle that won her independence, and a name adopted and defended against an entire social order, explain why she remains a reference point. She demonstrated in practice that a woman could live by her pen, direct her own affairs, and shape national debate. That demonstration, as much as any single book, is what modern readers find when they ask what her life amounted to ^[2].