In December 1833 George Sand traveled to Venice with her younger lover, the poet and novelist Alfred de Musset. She was trying to outrun the ruckus over her recent affair in Paris with the actress Marie Dorval. Also left behind were Sand’s young son and daughter, whom she frequently found surplus to requirements. Scandal, though, had a way of stalking the twenty-nine-year-old novelist. On arrival in the water-logged city the always sickly Musset contracted typhoid. A handsome doctor with a smart mustache was called, and within weeks Pietro Pagello and George Sand had become lovers. When Musset finally emerged from his sweaty sheets to discover what had been going on, he departed the city in high dudgeon. Four months later Sand and her twenty-six-year-old medico also returned to Paris, whereupon their relationship promptly floundered. Sand resumed her affair with Musset, though not before a catastrophic episode in which he threatened to kill either her or himself.
George Sand has proved catnip to scores of biographers in the 150 years since her death. Anglophone writers have been particularly tickled by the Frenchness of it all: not just the younger lovers but the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking, and extravagant passions. (Sand and her partners, being late Romantics, were always threatening to do away with themselves.) Particularly enthralling was Sand’s affair with Frédéric Chopin, the young Polish pianist-composer, which began in 1838 (after she’d dumped Musset) and lasted almost a decade. A Song to Remember, the Oscar-nominated film of 1945, cast Cornel Wilde as the heroic Chopin waylaid by Merle Oberon as a vampish Sand. Nearly fifty years later, Impromptu (1991) retold the story as wry, knowing rom-com, this time with Judy Davis as the capering novelist and Hugh Grant as the winsome composer.
Signally missing from these portraits of Sand, the biographies as well as the biopics, is much sense of her significance as one of the most critically influential and commercially successful writers of the nineteenth century. Sand’s seventy novels were best sellers and offered a radical critique of political authority, social convention, family life, and the economic conditions of both peasantry and proletariat. Nor, for all her Frenchness, was there anything remotely parochial about her. Across the Channel she received far more review coverage than Hugo or Balzac. A slightly later generation of British novelists—including the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy—was greatly influenced by her expansive vision of the novel as inhabited by psychologically vital characters who give every appearance of having been plucked from real life. Without George Sand there would be no Jane Eyre, no Adam Bede, no Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
The incongruence of the female writer more famous for love than literature is something that has long vexed Fiona Sampson. Becoming George is the final part of her loose trilogy of recuperative biographies of women from the Romantic period whose personal lives have been “used to occlude” their literary achievement. First in the series came Mary Shelley (2018), followed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2021). Now Sampson turns to Sand, promising to reverse the process by which the French novelist has habitually been reduced to “all personality, little art.” In a spirited introduction, she vows to reclaim those seventy soul-shaking books (not forgetting a further fifty volumes of memoir, travel writing, letters, and political polemic) as a crucial bridge from an earlier Romantic sensibility—the partial, fragmented, and often epistolary narratives of Goethe, Hugo, even Musset—to the midcentury social realism of Flaubert or Dickens.
It feels churlish to point out that this ambition to restore Sand’s work to canonical status has been the stated aim of virtually every biographer this century. In 2001 and 2006 Belinda Jack and Benita Eisler, respectively, announced their intentions to reacquaint Anglophone readers with Sand’s art, yet were subsequently criticized for allowing themselves to get overwhelmed by the uproar of her private life. Hovering behind this censure lay the assumption that Sand would always bamboozle her biographers, the female ones especially, by the sheer force of her personality, not to mention the unwieldy sprawl of her oeuvre. In the late nineteenth century a nameless librarian, perhaps wearying of days spent reshelving Sand’s 120 (and counting) titles, declared her to be a “pisseuse d’encre,” a pisser of ink. Put simply, George Sand wrote too much, with the result that the good, the bad, and the indifferent had been muddled together (sometimes in the space of a single book), making a settled assessment impossible. Easier in these circumstances to focus instead on her extraordinary life, with its sharply delineated peaks and troughs that bear endless revisiting.
George Sand was born Aurore Dupin in 1804, that pivotal year when France transitioned from revolutionary Republic to Napoleonic empire. Her father was the scion of an aristocratic family with attenuated links to European monarchy, her mother a demimondaine who already had an illegitimate daughter. In the ancien régime, Sand’s parents would have shared nothing more than a night of commercial sex, but in the new era of egalité, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde induced Maurice Dupin to marry her a month before Aurore’s birth during a rowdy party in their Paris apartment. This by-the-skin-of-her-teeth legitimacy made Aurore the heir to a handsome estate in Nohant in the Loire Valley. Maurice’s first child, a boy by another woman, remained illegitimate and, as if in protest, became an alcoholic. Then in 1808 Maurice died in an accident that suggested a certain patrician swagger: while riding home from a dinner with friends, the cavalry officer fell from his horse and snapped his neck.
Deprived of a paternal protector, young Aurore now found herself the object of a tug-of-war between two mothers. There was “Mama,” who returned to Paris, and possibly to her earlier occupation of sex work, to keep body and soul together. Then there was “Maman,” the aristocratic grandmother and chilly chatelaine of Nohant. Maman, to whom Mama signed over custody of little Aurore in 1809, particularly disapproved of the child’s habits of wandering the estate without shoes and of riding astride in the masculine manner. The only thing for it was to send the little tomboy to a Parisian boarding school run by British nuns, in the hope that they could do something with her. During the Revolution the school had served as a women’s prison where, coincidentally, both Maman and Mama had been incarcerated as enemies of the state—Maman for being an aristocrat, Mama for singing a counterrevolutionary song.
Seasoned readers of biographies will already have guessed what happened next. While still a teenager, Sand married a man who was the spit of her late father, being both a gentleman and a charmer. Casimir Dudevant was additionally a drunk, and all that can be said in his favor is that he was a marginally better prospect than the fifty-year-old general with a big saber scar across his face whom Maman had picked out for her granddaughter shortly before her own death in 1821. Children followed: a boy, Maurice, in 1823, whom Sand adored, and five years later a girl named Solange who seemed alternately to puzzle and annoy her mother and who may well have been the product of an affair with a neighbor.
Sand smothered and abandoned her children by turns, depending on whether they fit in with her plans. Her real maternalism was reserved for the many younger men she slept with. (The lesbian fling in 1833 was an isolated event.) You can always tell an affair with a young man is serious when Sand starts calling him “my child.” Fifty years before psychoanalysis, she was a walking case history of maternal ambivalence.
With the marriage soon ruined by outrageous infidelity on both sides, Sand became desperate to find her way back to Paris. In January 1831 she left Nohant for the capital with Jules Sandeau, a younger country neighbor who shared her literary ambitions. Until this point Sand’s creative output consisted of nothing more than an extravagant epistolary habit—in all, her published correspondence fills twenty-five volumes—and a juvenile propensity for making stuff up. This included a god called Corambé, a nonbinary deity and genius loci to whom she built childish woodland shrines. Out of these rich but untried materials Sand was determined to forge a writing career, and knew that Paris was the only place to do it.
She arrived in the city just as it was putting itself back together after the 1830 revolution that had brought Louis Philippe d’Orléans to the throne as “Citizen King.” Eighteen years later, in the aftermath of the Citizen’s deposition and exile, Sand campaigned vigorously for the setting up of a truly socialist republic. For now, though, a new liberalism was abroad, and Sampson paints an enticing picture of the city’s reenergized literary scene. The earlier age of the private salon had given way to the ink and bustle of a newsprint culture. Sand found her professional footing at Le Figaro, which at this point was far from a venerable establishment title. Dashing off columns for seven francs a piece, she regularly dropped into the office for gossip and to pick up leads for other work. “I have a goal, a task, let’s say the word, a passion,” she crowed, “the métier of writing is one that is violent and almost indestructible, once it’s seized some poor head, it can no longer be stopped.” Later, she called this period her “Romantic Rebellion.”
This is when Sand embarked on her infamous practice of appearing in public dressed as a man. Sampson is very good at cutting posterity’s wilder fantasies down to size, especially any idea of Sand as a proto-trans icon. Her cross-dressing was a pragmatic response to a social world that did not know what to do with independent women. Budget seats at the theater were reserved for men, and unchaperoned women were not welcome in cafés unless they were prostitutes. Wearing trousers solved the problem at a stroke and, indeed, had already become such a popular option for progressive women that the authorities had passed a law banning the practice. True to form, Sand obtained a permit from the Parisian police declaring her an exception to the rule.
Sampson usefully analyzes the famous sketch by Paul Gavarni from 1831–1832 that shows Sand in men’s clothing on the arm of her (assumed) lover. At only four foot eleven, the fledgling novelist is wearing well-cut trousers (clearly tailored for her rather than borrowed from her companion) and a topcoat pulled tight to show her tiny waist. One suspects a corset may have been involved. Dark curls escape from Sand’s top hat. She resembles less a man about town than a principal boy in the pantomime, a sexy garçonne, or, casting ahead, Marlene Dietrich.
There was another kind of male impersonation that Sand now tried on for size. Her earliest articles, cowritten with Sandeau, appeared under the androgynous nom de plume J. Sand, on the grounds that the editor at one magazine “hates women and does not want to hear about them.” A novel, Rose et Blanche, was also published under this shared byline. It soon became clear, though, that young Sandeau was not pulling his weight, and Sand was increasingly keen to dissolve their partnership and establish her own singular identity. It was now that Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin Dudevant settled on the sobriquet of “Georges Sand” before refining it months later to the more English-sounding “George Sand.” Within months of embarking on her writing career, she was writing triumphantly, “In Paris Mme Dudevant is dead. But Georges Sand is known as a sturdy fellow.”
Sand’s exultation was due in no small part to rapturous reviews of the first novel she wrote alone. Indiana (1832) tells the story of a young Creole noblewoman from Île Bourbon (later Réunion) trapped in a loveless marriage in rural France. Abused both by her military husband and her callous aristocratic lover, Indiana ultimately finds an equitable love with her gentle cousin back at their ancestral home in the Indian Ocean. The book’s notoriety arose from its savage criticism of the Napoleonic marriage code, which granted husbands complete power over their wives’ bodies and property. This iniquity had been further enshrined in 1816 when divorce was made illegal. Indiana—like Sand herself—is helpless to extract herself from an abusive marriage without losing everything. Yet this is more than autofiction avant la lettre. Sand deftly links Indiana’s personal powerlessness with the subordination of Île Bourbon to France’s imperial grasp. In connecting these different scales of oppression, Sand reveals herself to be a sharp and subtle reader of the political times.
Sand’s second novel, Valentine (1832), directly confronted the injustice of arranged marriages and reinforced her emerging status as a fearless truth teller. But it was her third, Lélia (1833), that caused an uproar for portraying the institution of marriage as nothing more than a blatant trading of sex for money. One outraged critic compared it to something written by the Marquis de Sade: “soiled, blackened, stinking of mud and prostitution.” The Catholic Church put the book on its banned list, which naturally thrilled Sand, who by now understood how the market worked: Lélia, she was happy to crow, was an “abominable book, the scandal of which guarantees its success.”
Even so, Sand cannot possibly have anticipated the vitriol that would now come her way. The ugliest sneers were from those male competitors whom she outwrote and outsold. These jealous slurs coalesced around a fantasy of Sand’s monstrous productivity, which overflowed the bounds of proper feminine decency. In 1852 Flaubert declared “in G Sand one smells the fluor albus [mucus]: everything oozes, and ideas trickle between words as though between slack thighs.” (He changed his tune after he met her.) Running with these metaphors of a leaky vessel, Baudelaire labeled Sand “a latrine” and Nietzsche called her “a dairy cow.” Then there was the librarian who said she pissed ink, and Sainte-Beuve who claimed she had an “enormous bottom.” And on it went. As late as 1893, decades after her death, Edmond de Goncourt declared that if Sand had had an autopsy, it would have revealed her clitoris to “somewhat resemble our penises.”
Feeding this wild notoriety was the public’s growing awareness that “George Sand” was in fact a married gentlewoman living a sexually free life in Paris. By then Sand had been unofficially separated from Casimir Dudevant for years, but as her fame and wealth grew, his claims upon her escalated. According to France’s punitive marriage laws, Dudevant owned Nohant—not just the ancestral manor house but all the land connected with the estate—and retained custody of Maurice and Solange. To regain what was rightfully hers, Sand embarked on an expensive legal campaign that dragged on for months. Thanks to the brilliance of her lawyer (and future lover) Michel de Bourges, she was successful in painting Dudevant to the court as debauched and cruel, and in 1836 George Sand finally achieved a legal and lasting separation. Nohant was returned to her, as was her daughter Solange. In time she also gained custody of Maurice. At the age of thirty-two George Sand had achieved the financial and social independence of a femme libre.
At this point in the extraordinary story the question reasserts itself: What is a biographer to do with George Sand, a writer and a woman who refuses to confine herself to manageable proportions and who insists, always, on her own exceptionalism? Fiona Sampson follows the time-hallowed compromise of producing a cradle-to-grave story that pushes the work to the margins unless it can be read biographically. (For a more sustained account of Sand’s intellectual reach, Martine Reid’s 2013 biography remains the better choice.)* In the process Sampson succumbs to some stylistic oddities, including a reliance on the historic present tense, the result perhaps of an anxiety about just how much historical complexity a modern reader can be expected to bear. For the same reason, presumably, she sprinkles her text with vernacular from the 1990s—“dykey,” “yummy mummy,” Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus—which further unsettles her book’s positioning in time and place.
Not even these infelicities, though, can hinder the momentum of Sand’s story. Just a few months after her courtroom triumph she met twenty-six-year-old Frédéric Chopin in Paris. He was distinctly unimpressed: “What an unappealing woman, this Sand! Is it truly a woman?” A few weeks later he was still being performatively disgusted: “Her face isn’t attractive to me and didn’t please me at all. There’s something in her that repels me.” Sampson leans into the idea, which has gained credence with the recent retranslation of Chopin’s letters, that the Polish émigré was not sexually interested in women. Certainly, on December 27, 1828, he wrote to a schoolmate begging to be allowed to kiss him: “You have to pay for the dirty dream I had about you last night.” Two years later he commands the same friend, “I want you, and I expect you clean-shaven.”
Chopin may not have been keen on sex with Sand, but there were plenty of other reasons for him to stick with her. His health was wretched; Sampson tends toward a diagnosis of tuberculosis, although this has been the subject of endless debate. Whatever the exact pathology, Sand was on hand to coax Chopin’s delicate appetite, soothe his hacking cough, and arrange for a trip to Mallorca where the climate, in theory, would be kinder to his shattered lungs. (In fact it rained all the time, which nearly finished him off.) Most valuably of all, Sand supported Chopin financially, which allowed him to give up performing and teaching to concentrate on composition. Sampson speculates that Chopin may also have welcomed the notoriety of his affair with France’s most infamous woman as a cover story for his continuing liaisons with men.
What Sand got out of the relationship is less clear. He was certainly her “type,” being slight, blond, and boyish, yet sex seems to have petered out early. And politically they were hardly aligned: she was radical, he conservative. Maurice and Solange, now teenagers, complicated the picture, especially when the quartet was stuck together at Nohant. Chopin took Solange’s side in a particularly nasty family argument concerning her fiancé, and squared up to Maurice, who resented another man behaving like the master of the house. And then there was the constant drain of caring for someone who rarely bothered to say please or thank you. Sand said it was like having a third child.
Yet the extended period that the odd couple spent together turned out to be immensely productive for them both. Fiona Sampson, who started her professional life as a classical violinist, is good at helping us understand the significance of Chopin’s achievement during this fraught time. It was now that he completed the Ballade in F major, composed the Scherzo no. 3 in C minor, and the Polonaise in C minor. And then there were the twenty-four Preludes, one in each of the twelve major and twelve minor keys. Taken together, these form the pinnacle of the Romantic piano repertoire and the backbone of modern classical piano recital. You can’t help noticing, though, that Chopin dedicates none of his pieces to George Sand. That honor was reserved for his aristocratic female pupils, including Charlotte de Rothschild.
Sand was equally productive. In 1843 she produced what is sometimes considered her best novel. Consuelo tells the story of a young Venetian opera singer, a subject she could not have tackled without Chopin’s musical influence. Less happy was Lucrezia Floriani (1846), which caused a furor that, for some reason, Sampson prefers to hurry past. The novel is a barbed, if not downright cruel, roman à clef that features a whiny Polish nobleman who uses his fragile health as a passive-aggressive bargaining tactic. When Sand read the manuscript to Chopin, he failed to realize that moody Prince Karol de Roswald was modeled on him. Unfortunately, everyone else did, and the gossip was so intense that the novel hastened the unraveling of their relationship. By this time Sand could not even pretend to care: “What a relief!… For nine years, while full of life, I have been tied to a corpse.” To be fair to Chopin, just two years later he was dead.
Just as the affair with her “Chopinet,” “Chip-Chip,” and “poor child” was winding down, Sand’s career experienced a second wave of critical and commercial success. It was now that she embarked on her celebrated “countryside” novels, based on her deep familiarity and feeling for the landscape around Nohant and the people who had lived there for centuries. La Mare au Diable (1846) is a concise tale of rural life and innocent love, while François le Champi (1847) traces the story of a foundling who grows up in the rolling, wooded landscape in which Nohant was situated. The book famously makes an appearance at the beginning of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, when young Marcel is soothed to sleep by his mother’s reading it to him.
Perhaps the most accomplished of these later romans champêtres is La Petite Fadette (1849), a story about an outspoken, gender nonconforming young girl who is ostracized by the local community as a witch. Raised by her grandmother, Fadette is aligned to the woodland sprites and folk deities to whom, as a child, George Sand had once built her shrines. After a thwarted romantic entanglement, Fadette leaves the village to escape the spiteful gossip. A year later, and with a new sheen of urban sophistication, she returns to nurse her stricken grandmother. After the old lady dies Fadette discovers a small fortune in gold coins hidden around the cottage. At a stroke she has been granted the material means to live exactly as she chooses.
Fadette’s destiny, though, involves far more than being the richest woman in the neighborhood. Far more too than being able to marry the man she loves, a local lad named Landry whose rich father had forbidden the match on grounds of financial disparity. Fadette’s new, enlarged vocation is to bring emotional and social healing to the local village community, a place riven by petty class distinctions and ancient jealousies. It was a role that clearly functioned as wish fulfillment for Sand herself. She had become painfully disillusioned with the 1848 revolution in Paris, which had started with high expectations of establishing a socialist utopia. Instead the political unrest had quickly degenerated into violence, bloodshed, and savage political division. Retreating to Nohant, Sand channeled her disappointment into La Petite Fadette, creating a moral fable in which a fractured society learns to heal its wounds with love and tolerance.
For the next twenty-seven years George Sand continued to write novels that spoke not of rupture but of reparation. Instead of stormy relationships with jumpy racehorses such as Musset and Chopin, she now settled into placid cohabitation with Alexandre Manceau, an engraver thirteen years younger than herself (some things didn’t change). By now George Sand was celebrated less as a monstre sacré than as a universal mother to the whole of France, the peasants as well as the intellectuals. When she died in 1876 Gustave Flaubert, the man who had once sniggered about her slack thighs and her constant leaking of words, admitted that he was a broken man. At her funeral, which took place in Nohant and was attended by thousands who’d made their way there as if on a pilgrimage, he had “wept like a calf.”