Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand [Hardcover]

Benita Eisler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2006

Who was George Sand? She was the first famous Frenchwoman celebrated throughout Europe who wasn't either a saint or a king's mistress. She was also the first woman in Europe to become a best-selling novelist. But her fame is inseparable from her notoriety: the scandal of leaving a husband and child, setting up in Paris with an eighteen-year-old lover, liaisons and friendships with men of talent and even genius: de Musset, Chopin, Balzac, and Flaubert. Politically engaged, Sand was literally, "there at the revolution," those of 1831 and 1848, reporting, analyzing, denouncing, exhorting. She believed always in Progress as she did in Love, though she was doomed to be betrayed in both. Acclaimed literary biographer Benita Eisler sheds new light on the many roles, triumphs, and losses that together constituted Sand's overwhelming presence. With nearly ninety novels, 20,000 letters, and thousands of pages of autobiographical writings and political commentary, how did Sand also have the time to live? As Eisler reveals, hers seems more like several lives--literary, political, amorous, and domestic. Earlier biographers have either flash-frozen Sand into a feminist icon or blurred her in the dynamic of "child of the century," but Naked in the Marketplace presents Sand at her essence--the outsized persona and the inner woman, along with the unique and irreplaceable role she played in the history of her times.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For all her notorious affairs with men, Sand's passionate and unrequited attachment to her mother is the real love story of her life," writes noted literary biographer Eisler (Chopin's Funeral) in her bustling study of the great French Romantic writer's love life. Capturing the complexity of George Sand's relationship with her adored but largely absent working-class mother, Eisler analyzes the writer's various attitudes to class in light of her childhood, as she rapidly narrates Sand's remarkable transformation from rebellious young wife and mother to cross-dressing, controversial Parisian literary star. Treating Sand's autobiography with skepticism, Eisler emphasizes how Sand (1804–1876) also caused strife for others in her turbulent emotional life. Eisler authoritatively sketches the themes and philosophical preoccupations of Sand's novels in an age of revolutionary ferment, but places Sand's affairs center stage: from Alfred de Musset's "romantic passion run amok" to her political education by radical lawyer Michel de Bourges, and her long relationship with Chopin. Eisler's Sand is doomed to act out the insecurities of her childhood in an ugly, punitive relationship with her own daughter, Solange. As Eisler comments, referring to Sand by her real name, "It was Aurore, the motherless child, who was both the cause and victim of much of George's confusion and suffering." (Nov.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* The startling title of this cinematic portrait of French writer George Sand is lifted from a remark by her polar opposite, Henry James, who was both appalled by Sand's very public affair with the poet Alfred de Musset and impressed by her commitment to exposing the injustices of a cruel class system. The daughter of a working-class woman and an heir to a distinguished family, the best-selling writer and valiant social critic who took a man's name and wore men's clothes as armor in a misogynist world wrote to earn both money and freedom, and ended up penning nearly 90 novels and countless articles while conducting a similarly dizzying number of love affairs and raising (badly) two children. Acclaimed biographer Eisler, whose earlier subjects include Lord Byron and Chopin (a great love of Sand's), has illuminated Sand's indomitable spirit, enormous capacity for work and pleasure, and deep emotional wounds in a narrative as character-driven, dramatic, and rich in psychology and ideas as the best of Sand's novels. Eisler's portrait of this woman of many firsts brings Sand and her boldly improvised life forward more vividly than ever before. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (November 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433496
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433493
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,080,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars the worst, June 13, 2009

By 

Just Another Amazon Customer (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand (Hardcover)

I haven't bothered to write an Amazon review for I don't know how many years, but this book really offended me by being so bad. Here goes. This supposed biography reads like a plodding summary of a much larger--and real--biography. Everything from Sand's life is told through prose that reminds one of the kind found in Barron's Book Notes: simplistic, shallow, monotonous, yawn-inducing, the kind that takes the "lit" out of "literature" and turns your reading into sheer torture. There's not only no in-depth analysis of either Sand the woman or the writer, there are nearly no quotes from Sand herself, and absolutely no excerpts from any of her writings. Except for the endless plot summaries of a few novels (not even the key ones) that serve absolutely no purpose, you could hardly tell that this is meant to be the biography of a WRITER. A pure abomination.

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Another George Sand Book...., August 10, 2008

By 

Caroline (Laguna Beach, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand (Hardcover)

Just a rehash of old information - a bit of a disappointment, but easy to read.