George Sand

George Sand (born July 1, 1804, Paris, France—died June 8, 1876, Nohant) was a French Romantic writer known primarily for her so-called rustic novels.

She was brought up at Nohant, near La Châtre in Berry, the country home of her grandmother. There she gained the profound love and understanding of the countryside that were to inform most of her works. In 1817 she was sent to a convent in Paris, where she acquired a mystical fervour that, though it soon abated, left its mark.

In 1822 Aurore married Casimir Dudevant. The first years of the marriage were happy enough, but Aurore soon tired of her well-intentioned but somewhat insensitive husband and sought consolation first in a platonic friendship with a young magistrate and then in a passionate liaison with a neighbour. In January 1831 she left Nohant for Paris, where she found a good friend in Henri de Latouche, the director of the newspaper Le Figaro, who accepted some of the articles she wrote with Jules Sandeau under the pseudonym Jules Sand. In 1832 she adopted a new pseudonym, George Sand, for Indiana, a novel in which Sandeau had had no part. That novel, which brought her immediate fame, is a passionate protest against the social conventions that bind a wife to her husband against her will and an apologia for a heroine who abandons an unhappy marriage and finds love. In Valentine (1832) and Lélia (1833) the ideal of free association is extended to the wider sphere of social and class relationships. Valentine is the first of many Sand novels in which the hero is a peasant or a workman.

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French literature: Sand

Meanwhile, the list of her lovers was growing; eventually it included, among others, Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin. She remained impervious to Musset’s skeptical views and Chopin’s aristocratic prejudices, while the man whose opinions she adopted wholeheartedly, the philosopher Pierre Leroux, was never her lover. The fact remains, however, that most of her early works, including Lélia, Mauprat (1837), Spiridion (1839), and Les Sept Cordes de la lyre (1840), show the influence of one or another of the men with whom she associated.

Eventually, she found her true form in her rustic novels, which drew their chief inspiration from her lifelong love of the countryside and sympathy for the poor. In La Mare au diable (1846), François le Champi (1848), and La Petite Fadette (1849), the familiar theme of George Sand’s work—love transcending the obstacles of convention and class—in the familiar setting of the Berry countryside, regained pride of place. These rustic tales are probably her finest works. She subsequently produced a series of novels and plays of impeccable morality and conservatism. Among her later works are the autobiography Histoire de ma vie (1854–55; “Story of My Life”) and Contes d’une grand’mère (1873; “Tales of a Grandmother”), a collection of stories she wrote for her grandchildren.