Horace [Paperback]

George Sand (Author), Zack Rogow (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 1995

The first English-language edition of a major work by George Sand. Translated by the winner of the 1994 BOMC-PEN Translation Award. "A courageous work, nowadays unjustly neglected". -- Renee Winegarten "Sand develops her most advanced political, social and sexual views in this classic work". -- Feminist Bookstore News

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Sand's sympathetic portrayals of the people won her adoration by her readers during her lifetime and scorn by the critics. In this novel about love surpassing conventional barriers?deemed too revolutionary during its day (the early 1840s) for wide dissemination and only now translated into English?Sand lets rip her radical views on egalitarianism of the classes and equality between the sexes. Set in Paris during the student unrest against the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, in 1832, Horace concerns the coming-of-age of a law student from a provincial family whose head is utterly turned by the opportunities in the big city to better himself both in fortune and in love. Horace is smooth but vain and boastful; he wins the lovely grisette Marthe because he must have passion and the Viscountess de Chailly because he must have glory, though in the end he loses his honor. While some of the characters, such as Marthe, are bland paradigms of working-class virtue, others, like Horace and the Viscountess, have teeth: they were evidently modeled on people in Sand's life. A delicious novel to prompt a revival of her work.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Sand's twentieth-century fame is based more on her radical behavior (for a nineteenth-century woman) than on her fiction. This is due, in part, to the fact that this daring novel has never before been available in English. Here Sand is at her fiery best--forthright, shrewd, and cutting. Considered far too scandalous to be published when Sand wrote it in the 1840s, Horace takes place in politically volatile and cholera-besieged Paris where working-class women are stigmatized for their limited means. Horace, a good-looking, undisciplined, and unprincipled dilettante, is supposed to be studying law, but instead wreaks much havoc in the lives of his generous and ever-tolerant friends. His turbulent story is told by Theophile, a medical student of noble birth and much wisdom, who lives with his pragmatic yet compassionate mistress Eugenie. In Eugenie and her friend Marthe, the romantic center of this often polemic but always captivating psychological drama, Sand has created women characters who stand in proud defiance of society's misogyny. Passionate about freedom, Sand forged a timeless tale of vanity and love, hypocrisy and altruism. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Mercury House; 1st edition (October 19, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156279082X
• ISBN-13: 978-1562790820
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of George Sand's best books..., October 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Horace (Paperback)

This is a truly fantastic book. It is written in George Sand's fourth period of creativity and emphasizes on what it means to be a man. G. Sand stresses on the qualities of human nature, but she does not criticize them on the surface. She shows what would happen if people accept them.

It is worth reading for anyone who feels they do not know what they want to do with their lives!

4.0 out of 5 stars Not light fare, but well worth it, December 5, 2004

By 

Anne-Marie Gilliland (Near D.C., USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Horace (Paperback)

This is the first George Sand book I have read. I was curious about her after watching the movie "Impromptu". It was a bit of a quest to get my hands on one of her books--possibly this would not have been my first choice. Either way, I found it very interesting.

It is hard to grasp the revolutionary nature of some of the ideas she has in this book--i.e. equality of women from a modern view point. Of course much of what she is saying and observing is still quite relevant in many ways. And she has a marvelous way of saying what she does. It makes me wish I could read French well enough to read it in the original.

It was a great example of first person narrative, and Horace certainly is a character unlike any other I have encountered in a book. Eugenie is a marvelous woman as well.