SAND, GEORGE

born July 1, 1804, Paris died June 8, 1876, Nohant, Fr. pseudonym of Amandine-Aaurore-Lucile (Lucie) Dudevant, ne Dupin French Romantic writer, noted both for her so-called rustic novels and numerous love affairs. She was brought up at Nohant, near La Chtre in Berry, the country home of her grandmother. There she gained the profound love and understanding of the countryside that were to inform most of her works. In 1817 she was sent to a convent in Paris, where she acquired a mystical fervour that, though it soon abated, left its mark. In 1822 Aurore married Casimir Dudevant. The first years of the marriage were happy enough, but Aurore soon tired of her well-intentioned but somewhat insensitive husband and sought consolation first in a platonic friendship with a young magistrate and then in a passionate liaison with a neighbour. In January 1831 she left Nohant for Paris, where she found a good friend in Henri de Latouche, the director of Le Figaro, who accepted some of the articles she wrote with Jules Sandeau under the pseudonym Jules Sand. In 1832 she adopted a new pseudonym, George Sand, for Indiana, a novel in which Sandeau had had no part. This novel, which brought her immediate fame, is a passionate protest against the social conventions that bind a wife to her husband against her will and an apologia for a heroine who abandons an unhappy marriage and finds love. In Valentine (1832) and Llia (1833) the ideal of free association is extended to the wider sphere of social and class relationships. Valentine is the first of many Sand novels in which the hero is a peasant or a workman. Meanwhile, the list of her lovers was growing; eventually it included, among others, Prosper Mrime, Alfred de Musset, and Frdric Chopin. Yet it would be a mistake to accept the popular impression of her as a nymphomaniac who changed her philosophy and politics to suit the views of each successive lover. When she thought she had found something approaching perfection in a man, she lived with him for years, caring for him with a love that was more that of a mother than of a mistress: she stayed eight years with Chopin, for example, until he left her after a quarrel. She remained impervious to Musset's skeptical views and Chopin's aristocratic prejudices, while the man whose opinions she adopted wholeheartedly, the philosopher Pierre Lerous, was never her lover. The fact remains, however, that most of her early works, including Llia, Mauprat (1837), Spiridion (1839), and Les sept Cordes de la lyre (1840), show the influence of one or another of the men with whom she associated. Eventually, she found her true form in her rustic novels, which drew their chief inspiration from her lifelong love of the countryside and sympathy for the poor. In La Mare au diable (1846), Franois le Champi (1848), and La Petite Fadette (1849), the familiar theme of George Sand's worklove transcending the obstacles of convention and classin the familiar setting of the Berry countryside, regained pride of place. These rustic tales are probably her finest works. In later life she produced a series of novels and plays of impeccable morality and conservatism. Probably the only later works that are likely to endure are her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (1854-55; Story of My Life), and Contes d'une grand'mre (1873; Tales of a Grandmother), stories she wrote for her grandchildren. When, after a peaceful old age, she died, she was mourned as a great writer, but, with a few exceptions, her works soon fell into neglect. It is said that she wrote too much and too quickly; certainly she wrote with astonishing fluency. It is also said that as a writer she was an idealist, that in her memoirs she shut her eyes to the unpleasant aspects of reality while in her novels she created characters of unbelievable innocence and charm. She was, however, a born storyteller, and, with her childlike optimism and ingenuous faith in life, it was natural that her stories should be fairy tales, her peasants good and kind, her endings happy. The novel, she declared, need not necessarily be the representation of reality. Additional reading Among the many biographies, the following are especially recommended: Andr Maurois, Llia: The Life of George Sand (1953; reprinted 1977); Curtis Cate, George Sand (1975); Ruth Jordan, George Sand (1976); Joseph Barry, Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand (1977); and Renee Winegarten, The Double Life of George Sand, Woman and Writer (1978). Patricia Thomson, George Sand and the Victorians: Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England (1977), demonstrates Sand's impact on Victorian writers.