George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large

The author of classic novels including Indiana and Lélia, George Sand is perhaps better known for her unconventional life. Belinda Jack unravels the many facets of this writer who counted among her friends and lovers everyone from Chopin and Liszt to Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sand defied convention by writing novels; but the fact that she was a cigar-smoking cross-dresser who took male and female lovers, declared marriage “barbarous,” and championed socialism made her a legend. Allowing Sand’s voice to be heard, but wise enough to question it, Jack presents a riveting study of a woman raised by her aristocratic grandmother and her prostitute mother, and whose life and work were forever fueled by rival worlds.

The author of classic novels including Indiana and Lélia, George Sand is perhaps better known for her unconventional life. Belinda Jack unravels the many facets of this writer who counted among her friends and lovers everyone from Chopin and Liszt to Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sand defied convention by writing novels; but the fact that she was a cigar-smoking cross-dresser who took male and female lovers, declared marriage “barbarous,” and championed socialism made her a legend. Allowing Sand’s voice to be heard, but wise enough to question it, Jack presents a riveting study of a woman raised by her aristocratic grandmother and her prostitute mother, and whose life and work were forever fueled by rival worlds.

Publishers Weekly

First and foremost the story of a social pioneer and intellectual acrobat, Jack's exploration of the life of George Sand (1804-1876) is not a standard literary biography. Jack is particularly insightful in her claim that for Sand, literature was not itself the goal of life, but rather a tool with which to probe her psyche in preparation for life. Thus Jack, a lecturer in French at Oxford, finds the seed of Sand's infatuation with the actress Marie Dorval in the inverted gender roles that drive her fiction of the period. And she suggests that Sand's creativity flowed from her writing to the enactment of her fantasies. "She wrote a great deal from personal experience," Jack explains. "But more usually she tested out, in her fiction, possibilities for life which she then had the courage to live out, after the writing event." Sand's diverse literary output, many sexual experiments and seemingly endless array of interests (which ranged from engaging in political activism to painting to making jam), according to the author, were all expressions of a single desire: Sand wanted to dictate the scope of her own life. She identified with both her mother's lower-class background and her father's aristocratic bearing; she thrilled in her femininity but often displayed what was deemed a manly love of physical exercise and intellectual freedom. Though Jack's approach seems at times a bit too coldly analytical for such a robust, effusive subject, she communicates, with unflagging compassion and grace, the force with which Sand traversed life, ignoring critics, defying cultural taboos and trumpeting her individuality. 16 pages of b&w illus. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Belinda Jack is fellow and Lecturer in French at Christ Church, Oxford.