She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and then putting them into books for the support of herself and her two children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism. She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical; she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform, and published many long novels in its support. George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make literary use. On her father’s side she was descended from a royal bastard. Her mother had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, “a child of the old pavements of Paris.” Thus the novelist united in one person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable, hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts--things which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time. France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world “on her own,” and instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women’s pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. “Oh, my dear Octave,” writes an adulterous wife to her lover, “never shall we pass a night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!” It is just a little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the pair are deceiving!