George Sand [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Harlan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2004

George Sand was the most famous—and most scandalous—woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific—she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange.

Drawing on archival sources—much of it neglected by Sand’s previous biographers—Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand’s writing and defined her life. Why was Sand’s relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women’s liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand’s identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand’s mother and grandmother, and Sand’s own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Danielle Steele would be hard-pressed to concoct a juicer tale than the scandalous life of 19th-century French writer George Sand (1804–1876), revisited in this perceptive and original biography by novelist Harlan (Footfalls, Watershed). Sand, née Aurore Dupin, left her husband and two children in provincial France and successfully launched herself as a self-supporting writer in Paris, donning men's clothing to ease passage into the professional world and taking a pseudonym to protect her aristocratic family's name. Sand took on many lovers, among them poet Alfred de Musset and composer Frédéric Chopin. Yet despite Sand's outward daring, as Harlan shows, she obsessed over her identity, as both a woman and an aristocrat. Based on her interpretation of Sand's letters, Harlan says that this question of identity is at the root of Sand's compulsively prolific writing, which produced scores of novels and plays, and 20,000 letters. Sand may indeed not have been her nobleman father's biological daughter, and her mother was from the lower classes. So, "with a tendency toward self-contradiction," she bounced ambivalently between ideals of feminine submission and emancipation, and sometimes obscured, sometimes flaunted her lineage. Harlan sensitively analyzes the gaps and idiosyncrasies in her subject's heavily self-edited correspondence, autobiography and novels to uncover a fresh portrait of this volatile, imaginative woman of letters. B&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

"George Sand is an undeniably impressive achievement. Written in a dynamic style, and deeply researched, this book is not only a biography of a fascinating literary and historical figure but also a compelling work of cultural history."—Annie Cohen-Solal, Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and University of Caen

“Elizabeth Harlan brings to bright life one of the greatest figures who ever wrote her way into history--in all her genius, passion, and flaws. George Sand is irresistible.”--Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University-->

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• ISBN-10: 0300104170
• ASIN: B000I0RRLC
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,759,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I have had a long-term obsession with George Sand ---, December 10, 2010

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caprezia - See all my reviews

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This review is from: George Sand (Hardcover)

Because I have had an obsession with George Sand for many, many years, ANY book written about her becomes a new passion for me. I found this book particularly interesting because the author quotes George Sand extensively and then analyzes Sand's words for the possible meaning behind them. Granted the explanations of George Sand's own words are the author's point of view, or opinion, but she occasionally brings forth novel ideas of what Sand was perhaps thinking when she wrote about herself and her life -- ideas that I might not have otherwise discerned. Perhaps not every George Sand historian will agree with the author's conclusions, but she (the author) has definitely studied Madame Sand's life in depth; she therefore has an authoritative right to comment in detail on her subject. Regardless of what anyone may believe is the 'truth' about George Sand, as 21st century readers we can only GUESS at what this astounding, prolific writer of the Romantic era actually thought and believed as a woman in 19th century France. I found this book, "George Sand," to be infinitely engrossing and well written. I believe anyone who has ever read a George Sand story or who has even a basic knowledge of this French author would thoroughly enjoy reading Elizabeth Harlan's book.