Women -- France -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
lover, and who invented the pseudonym of George Sand for her--she turned
her attention to literature. Her earliest work was to help Sandeau in
the composition of his novel, “Rose et Blanche” Her first independent
novel, “Indiana,” appeared at the close of 1831, and her second,
“Valentine,” two months later. These books produced a great and
immediate sensation, and she felt that she had found her vocation.
In 1833 she produced “Lebia”; in 1834 the “Lettres d’un Voyageur” and
“Jacques”; in 1835 “Andre” and “Leone Leoni.” After this her works
become too numerous and were produced with too monotonous a regularity
to be chronicled here. But it should be said that “Mauprat” was written
in 1836 at Nohant, while she was pleading for a legal separation from
her husband, which was given her by the tribunal of Bourges, with full
authority over the education of her children. These early novels all
reflect in measure the personal sorrows of the author, although
George Sand never ceased to protest against too strict a biographical
interpretation of their incidents. “Spiridion” (1839), composed under
the influence of Lamennais, deals with questions of free thought in
religion. But the novels of the first period of her literary activity,
which came to a close in 1840, are mainly occupied with a lyrical
individualism, and are inspired by the wrongs and disillusions of the
author’s personal adventures.
The years 1833 and 1834 were marked by her too-celebrated relations with
Alfred de Musset, with whom she lived in Paris and at Venice, and with
whom she quarrelled at last in circumstances deplorably infelicitous.
Neither of these great creatures had the reticence to exclude the world
from a narrative of their misfortunes and adventures; of the two it was
fairly certainly the woman who came the less injured out of the furnace.
In “Elle et Lui” (1859) she gave long afterward her version of the
unhappy and undignified story. Her stay in Venice appears to have
impressed her genius more deeply than any other section of her numerous
foreign sojournings.
The writings of George Sand’s second period, which extended from 1840
to 1848, are of a more general character, and are tinged with a generous
but not very enlightened ardour for social emancipation. Of these
novels, the earliest is “Le Compagnon du Tour de France” (1840), which
is scarcely a masterpiece. In the pursuit of foreign modes of thought,
and impelled by experiences of travel, George Sand rose to far greater
heights in “Jeanne” (1842), in “Consuelo” (1842-’43), and in “La
Comtesse de Rudolstade” (1844). All these books were composed in her
retirement at Nohant, where she definitely settled in 1839, after
having travelled for several months in Switzerland with Liszt and Mme.
d’Agoult, and having lived in the island of Majorca for some time
with the dying Chopin, an episode which is enshrined in her “Lucrezia
Floriani” (1847).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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