Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin published under a man’s name and, more scandalously for 1830s Paris, wore men’s clothing in public — not as disguise but because it let her walk into places, and hold opinions, no woman was supposed to occupy. She smoked cigars, took lovers including Chopin and Alfred de Musset, and outsold most of her male contemporaries while doing it.
The novels gathered here show a far wider range than her scandalous biography suggests: Indiana, a searing early attack on marriage as legal ownership; Mauprat, a Gothic romance about a violent man reformed by love; and the pastoral The Devil’s Pool, tender in a register almost nobody expected from her. She moved between genres as freely as she moved between identities.
Read alongside the French Realists who came just after her, Sand looks less like their predecessor and more like the writer who cleared the ground they all built on.
Read George Sand: The Major Novels →
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