George Sand

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George Sand (credit: Courtesy of the Musée Carnavalet, Paris)

(born July 1, 1804, Paris, France — died June 8, 1876, Nohant) French writer. During childhood she gained a love of the countryside that would inform most of her works. Married in 1822, she soon tired of her husband, Casimir Dudevant, and began a series of liaisons; her lovers included Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and, most importantly, Frédéric Chopin. She became famous (under her pseudonym) with her novel Indiana (1832), a protest against conventions that bind an unhappy wife to her husband. Lélia (1833) extended her iconoclastic views on social and class associations. Similar themes, along with her sympathy for the poor, are evident in her finest works, the so-called rustic novels, including The Devil's Pool (1846), The Country Waif (1848), and Little Fadette (1849).

For more information on George Sand, visit Britannica.com.

The French novelist George Sand (1804-1876) was the most successful woman writer of her century. Her novels present a large fresco of romantic sentiment and 19th-century life, especially in its more pastoral aspects.

George Sand was born Armandine Aurore Lucille Dupin in Paris on July 1, 1804. On her father's side she was related to a line of kings and to the Maréchal de Saxe; her mother was the daughter of a professional bird fancier. Aurore's father, Maurice Dupin, was a soldier of the Empire. He died when Aurore was still a child.

At the age of 14, tired of being the "apple of discord" between her mother and grandmother, Aurore went to the convent of the Dames Augustines Anglaises in Paris. Though she did her best to disrupt the convent's peaceful life, she felt drawn to quiet contemplation and direct communication with God.

To save Aurore from mysticism, her grandmother called her to her home in Nohant. Here Aurore studied nature, practiced medicine on the peasants, read from the philosophers of all ages, and developed a passion for the works of François René Chateaubriand. Her eccentric tutor encouraged her to wear men's clothing while horseback riding, and she galloped through the countryside in trousers and loose shirt, free, wild, and in love with nature.

Marriage and Lovers

When her grandmother died, Aurore became mistress of the estate at Nohant. At 19 she married Casimir Dudevant, the son of a baron and a servant girl. He was goodhearted but coarse and sensual, and he offended her lofty and mystical ideal of love. Aurore soon began to seek her idealized love object elsewhere. For a time she maintained a platonic relationship with Aurélien de Se‧ze, but eventually this affair languished. She had begun to realize that it was impossible to sustain love without physical passion.

At the age of 27 Aurore moved to Paris in search of independence and love, leaving husband and children behind. She began writing articles to earn her living and met a coterie of writers. Henri de Latouche and Charles Sainte-Beuve became her mentors.

Aurore fell in love with Jules Sandeau, a charming young writer. They collaborated on articles and signed them collectively "J. Sand." When she published her first novel, Indiana (1832), she took as her pen name "George Sand."

George Sand made a home for Sandeau and for her daughter, Solange, but eventually she wearied of his jealousy and idle disposition. He, in turn, realized that he could never overcome her essential frigidity. She felt as though she had failed in marriage as well as in adultery. Several novels of disillusioned love were the fruit of this period of her life. Then she met the young poet Alfred de Musset, and they became lovers.

George Sand legally separated from her husband; she gained custody over Solange, while her husband kept the other child, Maurice. She now came to enjoy great renown in Paris both as a writer and as a bold and brilliant woman. She had many admirers and chose new lovers from among them. Her lovers included the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and the doctor who attended Musset in Venice. Perhaps it was her inability to be aroused to physical passion that drove her from one lover to another. She compensated for this deficiency by the spiritual intensity of her love.

Political Views

George Sand was a democrat; she felt close to the people by birth, and she often praised the humble virtues of the urban and country poor in her novels. She was a Christian of sorts and advocated a socially conscious religion. Like Jean Jacques Rosseau, she believed that inherently good man was corrupted by civilization and faulty institutions.

Despite her own feminist leanings, George Sand never advocated political equality for women. It was in love that she demanded equality, in the free choice of the love object; the inequality of men and women before the law seemed to her a scandal.

Last Years

As she grew older, George Sand spent more and more time at her beloved Nohant and gave herself up to the intoxications of pastoral life, the entertainment of friends, the staging of puppet shows, and most of all to her grandchildren. Though she had lost none of her vital energy and enthusiasm, she grew less concerned with politics. Her quest for the absolute in love had led her through years of stormy affairs to the attainment of a tolerant and universal love - of God, of nature, of children. She died in Nohant on June 9, 1876.

Early Novels

Every night from midnight until dawn, George Sand covered her daily quota of 20 pages with her large, tranquil writing, never crossing out a line. All her novels are love stories in which her romantic idealism unfolds in a realistic setting. The characters are people she knew, although their sentiments are idealized.

The early works by George Sand are novels of passion, written to alleviate the pain of her first love affairs. Indiana (1832) has as its central theme woman's search for the absolute in love. Valentine (1832) depicts an aristocratic woman, unhappily married, who finds that a farmer's son loves her. Lélia (1854) is a lyrical but searching confession of the author's own physical coldness. Lélia is a beautiful woman loved by a young poet, but she can show him only maternal affection.

Socialist Novels

During the 1840s George Sand wrote a number of novels in which she exposed her socialist doctrine joined with a humanitarian religion. Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840), Consuelo (1842-1843), and Le Péchéde Monsieur Antoine (1847) are typical novels of this period. Her socialism was of an optimistic, idealistic nature. She sympathized in these novels with the plight of the worker and the farmer. She also wrote a number of novels devoted to country life, most produced during her retreat to Nohant at the time of the 1848 uprising. La Mare au diable (1846), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Maîtres sonneurs (1852) are typical novels of this genre. They celebrate the humble virtues of a simple life and offer idealized portraits of the peasants of Berry.

George Sand's last works show a tendency to moralize; in these novels the characters become incarnated theories rather than human beings.

Further Reading

George Sand's appeal to biographers has inspired a number of good works. Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn, The Seven Strings of the Lyre: The Romantic Life of George Sand, 1804-1876 (1927), is authoritative and carefully compiled. Felizia Seyd, Romantic Rebel: The Life and Times of George Sand (1940), is a straightforward account. André Maurois, Lélia: The Life of George Sand (1952; trans. 1953), is readable and emotionally compelling. Two books that emphasize George Sand's love life are Marie J. Howe, George Sand: The Search for Love (1927), and Frances Winwar, The Life of the Heart: George Sand and Her Times (1945).

Sand, George (pseudonym of Amandine‐Aurore‐Lucile Dudevant, née Dupin, 1804–76), French romantic novelist and writer. In her pastoral novels like La Mare au diable (The Devil's Pool, 1846), Sand included scenes of storytelling and references to folklore. Sand was raised on tales by Charles Perrault and Mme d'Aulnoy, whose impact on her œuvre resides primarily in her idealized representations of the countryside and nature, but her specific brand of the marvellous clearly was influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann's fantastic tales. It was not until Sand was herself a grandmother that she put together a collection of tales for her granddaughters Aurore and Gabrielle, entitled Contes d'une grand‐mère (Tales of a Grandmother, 1873).

Her tales have an overriding pedagogical function, in which children who have been abandoned in some way by their parents learn to overcome their weaknesses, often with the help of surrogate parents and a belief in the supernatural. In ‘Le Château de Pictordu’ (‘Pictordu Castle’), for instance, the feeble Diane, rejected by her stepmother and whose father is unimaginative, is brought back to life by the intervention of the veiled lady of the castle, who becomes her artistic inspiration. Characters often embody nature and anti‐nature, as in the case of Marguerite and her false cousin Mélidor in ‘La Reine Coax’ (‘Queen Coax’). In this tale, the fantastic is limited to the talking frog Queen Coax, who is in fact a projection of Marguerite's penchant for the unnatural which she must overcome. Other tales in the collection include ‘Le Nuage rose’ (‘The Pink Cloud’), ‘Les Ailes de courage’ (‘Wings of Courage’), ‘Le Géant Yéous’ (‘Yeous the Giant’), ‘Le Chêne parlant’ (‘The Talking Oak Tree’), and ‘La Fée Poussière’ (‘The Fairy Dust’).

Bibliography

• Lane, Brigitte, ‘Les Contes d'une grand‐mère I: ‘Les Ailes de courage’ ou ‘l'envol du paysan’: Reinvention d'un genre’, George Sand Studies, 11.1–2 (spring 1992).
• Persona, Mariangela, ‘L'Imaginaire pédagogique dans les Contes d'une grand'mère de George Sand’, Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature, 11 (1986).

— Anne Duggan

Sand, George (1804-76). Pen-name of Aurore Dupin, baronne Dudevant, a prolific and important author. Her father, a military officer, died in 1808 and Aurore, the subject of some contention between mother and grandmother, was brought up in large part by the latter at Nohant, in Berry, where she spent much of her later life and about which she often wrote. For some years a boarder at an Augustinian convent, she was an unruly pupil, but also knew moments of intense mysticism. In 1822 she married Casimir Dudevant by whom she had her son Maurice; the marriage was not a happy one and led to a much-contested separation. She had a series of lovers, including Jules Sandeau, Musset, the leftist lawyer Michel de Bourges, and Chopin (for nine years). The relationships were often tumultuous and are reflected in both her writings and those of others, including her lovers. She was also a close friend of Flaubert, who wrote ‘Un cœur simple’ in her honour.

Politically to the Left, especially in the late 1830s and 1840s, she was active in the Revolution of 1848, writing extensively on political matters, but after Napoleon III's coup d'état of 1851 she largely withdrew from politics. Though she used a male pseudonym and often dressed as a man, she was in her way a feminist, sharply critical of the inequities of marriage as defined by the Napoleonic Code and of the inferior education and status given to women [see Women Writers]. She refused, however, to stand for election to parliament in 1848 or to seek election to the Académie Française.

Her many works include novels, short stories, plays, travel literature, and autobiographical writings, as well as political literature and an extremely rich correspondence. She began by collaborating with others, notably Sandeau (it was at this time that she began to use her pseudonym). Indiana (1832), her first solo novel, a study of the fate of women in marriage, was an immediate success, as was Valentine (1832), which explores a problem she often treats, that of love or friendship among people of different classes. Lélia (1833), with a rather complicated and melodramatic plot, describes the mal du siècle as experienced by a heroine. Sand here broke with the tradition of the woman's novel as being primarily about love and joined Madame de Staël in making it a vehicle for philosophical, religious, and political concerns. A second version (1839) ends more happily. Jacques (1834), an epistolary novel, deals with the triangle of older husband-young wife-lover, and with suicide, and reflects her troubled relation with Musset. Mauprat (1837) recounts the transformation of the hero by his love for the heroine; it is the first of her novels to be situated in her native Berry.

Her writings of the following decade are much marked by her political preoccupations and by the influence of leftist intellectuals such as Lamennais and Pierre Leroux. Spiridion (1838-9) recounts a spiritual quest for a new religion and discusses the relation between religious and political progress. Les Sept Cordes de la lyre (1840), a closet drama in the mode of Goethe's Faust, adds to these problems various meditations on the nature of art, music, and inspiration, and on the role of woman in creating progress. Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840) presents these same preoccupations as experienced by the politically conscious workers of the period, and provides interesting insight into workers' organizations at the time. Le Meunier d'Angibault (1845), with a more plausible plot, depicts peasant life and ends with the proposed foundation of a Utopian community. Her most important novel of this period was Consuelo, with its sequel La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, partly inspired by the Hussite movement which she also analysed in two historical works, Jean Zyska and Procope le Grand (1842). All these works are deeply marked by her hopes for a spiritual and political renewal which would usher in the Joachimist third age; they are among the most important texts revealing the Romantic aspiration for Utopia. Later in life she would see in liberal Protestantism an acceptable form of that new religion; Mademoiselle La Quintinie (1863) examines this hope.

Already before the failure of the Revolution of 1848, however, she began producing those ‘rustic novels’ for which she was best known and appreciated by a broad public. Jeanne (1843) is a transposition of the story of Jeanne d'Arc in the form of a saintly peasant girl coveted by various men, a highly successful combination of the rustic tradition and metaphysical and social concerns. La Mare au diable (1846), La Petite Fadette (1848), dealing with superstition and love, François le Champi (1848), and Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853) continue in this vein; the last also provides meditations on the meaning of music and of initiation. As portraits of rustic life these novels often possess real anthropological value for the information they provide on folk tradition and folklore. But they are also governed by Sand's concerns with social equality and progress, with the love of justice and the constraining powers of convention, and with the relations between reason and sentiment.

Sand also wrote extensively for the theatre. If Les Sept Cordes de la lyre was not meant to be staged, Cosima was performed in 1840 and was followed by a number of other plays. Some of these are highly innovative in form. She also produced a considerable body of travel and autobiographical literature, including the Lettres d'un voyageur (1837), mostly set in Italy but also describing her personal tribulations, and Un hiver à Majorque (1841). Histoire de ma vie (1854) is her lengthiest and most ambitious autobiographical work, including remarkable evocations of her childhood, her convent life, her early career as a writer, and reflections on the political events both of her past and of the time of writing. Elle et lui (1858) is a highly autobiographical novel about her relation with Musset. In her last years she wrote her Contes d'une grand-mère (1872-6), which rehearse in a more fantasized mode her lifelong preoccupation with forming character and meaningful relations despite the restrictions of social conformity and false beliefs.

Often disparaged by such contemporaries as Baudelaire, Sand remains the major woman writer of French Romanticism and someone who renewed literature by her successful melding in innovative forms of the autobiographical, the amorous, and the pastoral tradition with political, moral, and philosophical concerns. Like Hugo, she managed to write simultaneously for a wide public and for an intellectual élite, to combine visionary aspirations with a sharp sense of contemporary reality and its shortcomings, to blend realism and the poetic.

[Frank Paul Bowman]

Bibliography

• P. Salomon, George Sand (1984)
• D. Powell, George Sand (1990)

Quotes:

"One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe."

"Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument."

"I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it."

"It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil."

"I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity."

"There is only one happiness in life -- to love and to be loved."

See more famous quotes by George Sand

George Sand. Photo by Nadar, 1864.

Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, later Baroness (French:baronne) Dudevant (1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ sɑ̃d]), was a French novelist. She is considered by some a feminist although she refused to join this movement. She is regarded as the first French female novelist to gain a major reputation.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Contemporary views 3 Relationships 4 Writing career 5 Death 6 Works 6.1 Novels 6.2 Plays 7 In literature 8 In music, film, TV 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links

Early life

Casimir Dudevant in the 1860s

Sand's father, Maurice Dupin, was a distant relative of Louis XVI and grandson of the Marshal General of France, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, himself an illegitimate son of August the Strong, King of Poland and a Saxon elector.^[2] Sand's mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a commoner. Sand was born in Paris but raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother, Marie Aurore de Saxe, Madame Dupin de Franceuil, at her grandmother's estate, Nohant, in the French region of Berry (See House of George Sand). She later used the setting in many of her novels. It has been said that her upbringing was quite liberal. In 1822, at age 19, she married Baron Casimir Dudevant (1795–1871), illegitimate son of Baron Jean-François Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice (1823–1889) and Solange (1828–1899). In early 1831 she left her prosaic husband and entered upon a four- or five-year period of "romantic rebellion." In 1835 she was legally separated from Dudevant and took her children with her.

Contemporary views

Sand, by Auguste Charpentier, 1835.

Sand's reputation came into question when she began sporting men's clothing in public — which she justified by the clothes being far sturdier and less expensive than the typical dress of a noblewoman at the time. In addition to being comfortable, Sand's male dress enabled her to circulate more freely in Paris than most of her female contemporaries could, and gave her increased access to venues from which women were often barred — even women of her social standing.

Also scandalous was Sand's smoking tobacco in public; neither peerage nor gentry had yet sanctioned the free indulgence of women in such a habit, especially in public (though Franz Liszt's paramour Marie D'Agoult affected this as well, smoking large cigars). These and other behaviors were exceptional for a woman of the early and mid-19th century, when social codes—especially in the upper classes—were of the utmost importance.

As a consequence of many unorthodox aspects of her lifestyle, Sand was obliged to relinquish some of the privileges appertaining to a baroness — though, interestingly, the mores of the period did permit upper-class wives to live physically separated from their husbands, without losing face, provided the estranged couple exhibited no blatant irregularity to the outside world.

Poet Charles Baudelaire was a 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."^[3]

Relationships

Sand sewing. Portrait by Eugene Delacroix, 1838. Originally part of painting showing both Sand and Chopin.

Sand conducted affairs of varying duration with Jules Sandeau (1831), Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset (summer 1833 – March 1835), Louis-Chrystosome Michel, Pierre-François Bocage, Félicien Mallefille and Frédéric Chopin (1837–47).^[4]

Later in life, she corresponded with Gustave Flaubert. Despite their obvious differences in temperament and aesthetic preference, they eventually became close friends.

She was engaged in an intimate friendship with actress Marie Dorval, which led to widespread but unconfirmed rumors of a lesbian affair.^[5] Letters written by Sand to Dorval mentioned things like "wanting you either in your dressing room or in your bed."

Stylized rendition of Delacroix's 1838 joint portrait of Sand and Chopin

In Majorca one can still visit the (then abandoned) Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa, where she spent the winter of 1838–39 with Chopin and her children.^[6] This trip to Majorca was described by her in Un Hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca), published in 1855. Chopin was already ill with incipient tuberculosis at the beginning of their relationship, and spending a winter in Majorca - where Sand and Chopin did not realize that winter was a time of rain and cold, and where they could not get proper lodgings - exacerbated his symptoms.

They split two years before his death, for a culmination of reasons. Sand's insecurities at forty probably contributed to her boredom and sexual poverty with Chopin. In her book, "Lucrezia Floriani", Sand used Chopin as a model for a sickly Eastern European prince named Karol. He's cared for by a middle-aged actress past her prime, Lucrezia, who suffers a great deal by caring for Karol. ^[7]Though Sand claimed not to have made a cartoon out of Chopin, the books publication and widespread readership may have exacerbated their apathy to each other. However, the tipping point in their relationship involved her daughter, Solange. Chopin continued being cordial with her after she and her husband, Auguste Clesinger, had a vicious falling out with Sand over money. Sand took Chopin's lending a hand to Solange as outright treachery, and confirmation that Sand had always "loved" Solange^[8]. Sand's son, Maurice, also disliked Chopin and wanted to establish himself more as the man of the estate. Chopin was never asked back to Nohant. In 1848, he returned to Paris from a tour of the UK and died at the Place Vendome. Penniless, his friends paid for his stay there, and his funeral at the Madeleine. The event, with over 3,000 people attending including Delacroix, Liszt, Victor Hugo and other, did not see George Sand attend.

Writing career

Sand in 1875

A liaison with the writer Jules Sandeau heralded her literary debut. They published a few stories in collaboration, signing them "Jules Sand." She consequently adopted, for her first independent novel, Indiana (1832) , the pen name that made her famous – George Sand.^[9]

Her first published novel, Rose et Blanche (1831), was written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau.

Drawing from her childhood experiences of the countryside, she wrote the rural novels La Mare au Diable (1846), François le Champi (1847–1848), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Beaux Messieurs Bois-Doré (1857). A Winter in Majorca described the period that she and Chopin spent on that island in 1838-9.

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).

Further 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.

In addition, Sand authored literary criticism and political texts. Sand wrote many essays and published works establishing her socialist position. It is believed that because of her early life, she sided with the poor and working class because of this. When the Revolution started in 1848, women had no rights and Sands believed these were necessary for progress. Around this time Sands started her own newspaper which was published in a workers co-op. ^[10]This allowed her to publish more political essays. She wrote "I cannot believe in any republic that starts a revolution in killing its own proletariat."

Her most widely used quote is "There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved."

She was known well in far reaches of the world, and her social practices, her writings and her beliefs prompted much commentary, often by other luminaries in the world of arts and letters. A few excerpts demonstrate much of what was often said about George Sand:

"She was a thinking bosom and one who overpowered her young lovers, all Sybil — a Romantic."

V.S. Pritchett (writer)

"What a brave man she was, and what a good woman."

Ivan Turgenev (novelist)

"The most womanly woman."

Alfred de Musset (poet)

Death

Tomb of George Sand, in the village Nohant-Vic.

George Sand died at Nohant, near Châteauroux, in France's Indre département on 8 June, 1876, at the age of 71 and was buried in the grounds of her home there. In 2004, controversial plans were suggested to move her remains to the Panthéon in Paris.

Works

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• Voyage En Auvergne (autobiographical sketch, 1827)
• Compagnon Du Tour De France (1840)
• La Petite Fadette (1848)
• Château Des Désertes (1850)
• Histoire De Ma Vie (autobiography up to the revolution of 1848; 1855)

Novels

• Rose Et Blanche (1831, with Jules Sandeau)
• Indiana (1832)
• Valentine (1832)
• Lélia (1833)
• Andréa (1833)
• Mattéa (1833)
• Jacques (1833)
• Kourroglou / Épopée Persane (1833)
• Leone Leoni (1833)
• Simon (1835)
• Mauprat (1837)
• les Maîtres Mosaïtes (1837)
• l'Oreo (1838)
• l'Uscoque (1838)
• Spiridion (1839)
• Un Hiver À Majorque (1839)
• Pauline (1839)
• Horace (1840)
• Consuelo (1842)
• La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1843, a sequel to Consuelo)
• Jeanne (1844)
• Teverino (1845)
• Pêche de M Antoine (1845)
• Le Meunier D'Angibault (1845)
• La Mare Au Diable (1846)
• Lucrezia Floriani (1846)
• François Le Champi (1847)
• La Petite Fadette (1849)
• Les Maîtres Sonneurs (1853)
• La Daniella (1857)
• Elle Et Lui (1859)
• Jean De La Roche (1859)
• L'Homme De Neige (1859)
• La ville Noire (1860)
• Marquis De Villemer (1860)
• Mademoiselle La Quintinie (1863)
• Laura, Voyage Dans Le Cristal (1864)
• Le Dernier Amour (1866, dedicated to Flaubert)
• the marquise

Plays

• Gabriel (1839)
• François Le Champi (1849)
• Claudie (1851)
• Le Mariage De Victorine (1851)
• Le Pressoir (1853, Play)
• French Adaptation of As You Like It (1856)
• Le Marquis De Villemer (1864)
• L'Autre (1870, with Sarah Bernhardt)

In literature

Frequent literary references to George Sand can be found in Possession (1990) by A. S. Byatt. The American poet Walt Whitman cited Sand's novel Consuelo as a personal favorite and the sequel to this novel La Comtesse De Rudolstady contains at least a couple of passages that appear to have had a very direct influence on him. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), the English poet, produced two poems "To George Sand: A Desire" and "To George Sand: A Recognition". The character, Stepan Verkhovensky, in Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed took to translating the works of George Sand in his periodical, before the periodical was subsequently seized by the ever-cautious Russian government of the 1840s. George Sand is referenced a number of times in the play Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy. And, 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 birthday package 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. George Sand also 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).

In music, film, TV

• A Song to Remember (1945), directed by Charles Vidor, starring Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand.
• Notorious Woman (1974), a 7-part BBC miniseries starring Rosemary Harris as George Sand and George Chakiris as Chopin.
• In 1976, the band Ambrosia recorded the song "Danse With Me, George (Chopin's Plea)", based on Sand and Chopin's romance. It appeared on Ambrosia's Album "Somewhere I've Never Travelled."
• Impromptu (1991), starring Judy Davis as George Sand and Hugh Grant as Chopin.
• Les Enfants du siècle (1999), starring Juliette Binoche as George Sand and Benoît Magimel as Alfred de Musset
• Chopin (2002), directed by Jerzy Antczak starring Danuta Stenka as George Sand and Piotr Adamczyk as Chopin.
• Gossip Girl (2008), Blair Waldorf plans to astonish the dean of Yale University by answering 'George Sand' to his question of whom she would have dinner with, dead or alive. In another episode, Blair Waldorf says "Why rip off a page of your life when you can throw the whole book into the fire? George Sand, she understands me."
• In 2007, Céline Dion recorded a song based on a love letter sent from George Sand to Alfred de Musset for her album D'Elles.
• The game Eternal Sonata mentions the relationship between George Sand and Chopin.
• The band Meg & Dia have a song based on Sand's novel Indiana

See also

• Feminist literature
• Gustave Flaubert, with whom Sand conducted an intimate correspondence.
• Pauline Viardot
• House of George Sand
• Musée de la Vie Romantique
• Saint-Benoît-du-Sault

Notes

1. ^ Gillian Tindall (June 2, 1991). "The Countryside of Balzac and Sand". The New York Times. p. 2. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/02/travel/the-countryside-of-balzac-and-sand.html?pagewanted=2. 
2. ^ Musee de la Vie Romantique, Paris (family tree)
3. ^ Baudelaire, Charles; Ed. Peter Quennell. Trans. Norman Cameron (1975). My Heart Laid Bare. Haskell House. p. 184. ISBN 0-8383-1870-3. 
4. ^ Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris, pp. 160, 165, 194–95.
5. ^ George Sand by Belinda Jack - Books - Random House
6. ^ museoin.htm
7. ^ Szulc, Tad. "Chopin in Paris", p. 326.
8. ^ Szulc, Tad. "Chopin in Paris", p. 344. (From the correspondence of Sand and Chopin)
9. ^ Jean-Albert Bédé, "Sand, George," Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., vol. 24, p. 218.
10. ^ George Sand: The Story of Her Life

References

• Jean-Albert Bédé, "Sand, George," Encyclopedia Americana, 1986 ed., vol. 24, pp. 218–19.
• Correspondence (letters) by George Sand and her contemporaries (see "Writings by George Sand" link below — some of these letters are available in English translation); Autobiographical writings as mentioned above (several of these also available from Gutenberg website).
• Tad Szulc, Chopin in Paris: the Life and Times of the Romantic Composer, New York, Scribner, 1998, ISBN 0-684-82458-2.
• Doumic, René - George Sand, some aspects of her life and writings at Project Gutenberg
• In French:
  • Caro, Elme - George Sand at Project Gutenberg
  • Roy, Albert le - George Sand et ses amis at Project Gutenberg
  • Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de la Langue Française 3ième édition
• Paintault, Micheline, Director, Cerf, Claudine, Author. George Sand: The Story of Her Life. DVD. FRANCE 5 ; SCEREN-CNDP, 2004. http://media.sceren.fr/index.php?id=20&fiche=3585&L=1&cat=-1
• Yates, Jim: Oh!Père Lachaise:Oscar's Wilde Purgatory, Édition d'Amèlie 2007: ISBN 97809555836-1-2 Oscar Wilde dreams of George Sand and is invited to a soirée at Nohant.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: George Sand

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George Sand

• Works by George Sand at Project Gutenberg
• Works by George Sand at Internet Archive
• Lithograph
• Iconography, by Eugène Delacroix, Ordrupgaard Museum, Copenhagen
• (French) George Sand, her work in audio version

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