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It would be hard to find a more courageous and perverse, iconic yet controversial figure in European literary history than George Sand. One of the great romantics, she helped transform culture, and her writing shifted social attitudes in ways we still benefit from. Victor Hugo called her “an immortal”; Gustave Flaubert, “one of the great figures of France”. Matthew Arnold said she was “the greatest spirit in our European world [since] Goethe”.
The 150th anniversary of her death this year is a chance to revisit her extraordinary achievements and legacy. But to do that we need to debunk some of the myths that surround this pioneering ecological, feminist and republican writer.
A prolific polymath, Sand published 70 novels, as well as travel writing, criticism, autobiography, political polemic and visionary essays on the interconnectedness of the natural world. She founded several politically progressive periodicals and became a highly successful playwright.
But none of it came easy. When she burst on to the Paris scene in 1831 at 27, writing for Le Figaro, she became immediately notorious as a woman in a man’s world. Contemporary gossip columns – like male critics ever since – portrayed her as both a man-hater and a man-eater. She was the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking divorcee Charles Baudelaire would label “a latrine”, and Friedrich Nietzsche “a dairy cow”. Yet, through pandemic, riots, typhoid, divorce and custody battles, bereavements and war, Sand never gave up on her vocation.
She makes it look so simple. Her writing is beautiful, expressive and easy to read. Yet her technique was radical. Emotional, idealistic writing about social injustice was something new. She wrote intimately, avoiding the panoramas of Balzac or Dickens. Her stories were full of detail about lived experience. And, starting with her bestselling 1832 debut Indiana, about the cruelty of arranged marriages, she placed women and children at the centre of their own stories.
That we now take this for granted is part of Sand’s legacy: the Brontë sisters, for example, imitated and admired her. A grandmother of fiction of social exclusion, in her 40s she turned her attention to the rural poor. Again she was ahead of her time, producing novels such as The Devil’s Pool, Little Fadette and François le Champi decades before Thomas Hardy explored Wessex.
Yet she was also just a convent girl from the provinces. She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil in 1804, to a Paris sex worker and an aristocratic cavalry officer. Her legitimacy – not to mention a life-changing inheritance – was secured by their shotgun marriage just a month before her birth. Her own marriage at 18, to an alcoholic boor, failed within a decade. They had two children; though one, her daughter, may have been the result of an affair.
When she left the family home in sleepy Indre for literary Paris it was with a lover, Jules Sandeau, with whom she co-wrote commercial fiction. But she didn’t abandon her children, and was eventually and most unusually awarded custody. She almost immediately outstripped Sandeau, but adapted his name into the nom de plume she would make famous. A male pen name was nothing unusual, as the Brontë “Bell brothers” and George Eliot would soon attest. But this one resembles a gleeful chopping down to size. “George” isn’t even a real French name, but a shortening of “Georges”.
Over the following years, Sand’s flamboyant promiscuity helped make her notorious. She was portrayed wearing men’s clothes, a habit she had picked up as a teenager in order to ride better. In Paris, this became a costume proclaiming her status as one of the literary “boys”, and enabling her to move freely around the city. But she wasn’t unusual: so many women were taking advantage of the freedom of movement crossdressing allowed that in 1800 the capital had issued a bylaw prohibiting it.
Sand also wore dresses, and her mostly heterosexual flings included a one-night stand with Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen (whose endowment she allegedly ridiculed), an affair with a leading actor, and a series of relationships with younger, financially dependent male partners. The adventures more or less stopped in 1838, when she became involved with the best known of these, Frédéric Chopin.
It was not a happy period. Their first year together included two months in an idyllic Carthusian monastery on Mallorca, where Sand had taken the pianist-composer for his health. Chopin would eventually die of tuberculosis: this stay became infamous because freak bad weather made him more unwell.
Tradition makes Sand the villain of this piece. In fact, for nine years she not only tended Chopin with care, working the traditional female domestic double shift; she also assumed financial responsibility so he could concentrate on composing. In this sense, his oeuvre from the Preludes onwards is another of her legacies. We now know from Sand’s letters how little Chopin desired her, and from his own how explicitly sexual his affection was for male friends.
Genius fascinates us by being made, not born, yet claiming to be the opposite. The additional obstacles women have historically overcome make their processes of self-invention particularly clear. But Sand isn’t just a history lesson. Everything that made her the pioneering exception in her lifetime makes her astonishingly relevant today. She simply refused to do what was expected of her. Storming the male bastions of literary Europe, she blazed a trail for future female artists from Elizabeth Gaskell to Louise Bourgeois to Taylor Swift. Her subversive adoption of the male writer’s uniform – from cigar and top hat to spats and riding coat – is brave and funny. It queers the notion of authority.
It’s also part of a shapeshifting refusal to be pigeonholed. Whether as the consummate professional turning in copy to editors who relied on her, or the loving grandmother tutoring two generations of her own family, she did it all. She campaigned for causes including an end to arranged marriage, the Revolutionary progressives of 1848, and the rights of a young rape victim with mental disabilities. She gave her earliest heroine, Indiana, global majority heritage. In the Val de Loire region of France where she grew up, and later helped the local poor, she was known as the Good Lady of Nohant.
Perhaps most remarkably, this pioneering feminist was also a pioneering ecologist. In her country novels, and in a series of essays written for Le Temps in 1871-2, she presented the natural world as something independent and interdependent, an insight prefiguring James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis a century later. Except that, typically, she personified nature as Corambé, a non-binary divinity of her own invention.
How on earth did Sand bring it all together? It took a fellow writer, her old friend Gustave Flaubert, to understand that it was her storytelling that integrated everything. At her funeral in 1876, he reported, celebrities and villagers mingled “up to our ankles in mud [and] a gentle rain”. This was, he points out, “like a chapter in one of her books”.
