Belinda Jack's detailed and passionate new biography of George Sand captures all the "subversive exuberance" of the life of the "female Don Juan" whose sexual exploits scandalised France. Described as "a great man" by Gustave Flaubert, and "the finest female genius of any country or age," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand was one of the best-known French writers of her generation. A prodigious and popular novelist whose youthful ambition had been to earn a living by her pen, Sand became famous for bestselling works such as Indiana, Consuelo, Mauprat, Elle et Lui and her infamous autobiography, The Story of My Life. She was equally well-known as a journalist, playwright, actress--and a lifelong correspondent with the leading thinkers and political shapers of her epoch. She numbered among her friends--and lovers--Honore de Balzac, Franz Liszt, Saint-Beuve, Chopin, Marie Duval, Alexandre Dumas, Flaubert, Sarah Bernhardt and Ivan Turgenev.

Sand's critics were as august as her admirers--the poet Baudelaire described her as a "latrine", and Nietzsche famously took issue with her commitment to articulating the need for equality between the sexes, and her literary Romanticism. Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, her father was an aristocrat, her mother a proletarian prostitute. Unconventional, uncompromising and always critical of social hypocrisy, Sand "believed her mixed ancestry clung to her", like "a kind of original sin which smelt of the people." A radical republican, she was identified with the 1848 revolution. Belinda Jack's life of Sand ably keeps pace with the dynamic existence of her revolutionary subject, and informatively documents Sand's role in the contemporary political scene, presenting a persuasive portrait of an idealist and iconoclast who ultimately could not accept the compromises of practical politics.

Frankly unapologetic about her serial non-monogamy and flouting of all sexual conventions, Sand was pragmatic about the practicality of her notorious cross-dressing. Declaring that she cross-dressed in order to achieve "not being noticed as a woman", she desired to "circulate and see without being seen"--a compulsion to observe central to the novelist's role. The separation of the gusto--and apparently tireless--intrigue of Sand's personal sexual life from the practical and professional motivations for her cross-dressing in public is the particular achievement of Jack's biography. A renegade publicly, personally and intellectually, Sand's commercially successful writing reflected the events of her life, "Sex, sexuality, incest and cross-class relationships are some of the recurrent themes of her fiction, sometimes clearly visible, sometimes tantalisingly half submerged." Jacks deflects the stock characterisations of Sand as a pipe-touting, trouser- wearing proto-lesbian to explore these more "tantalising" and "half-submerged themes". In particular, she carefully evokes the motif of incest in Sand's personal relationships, and the ways in which her fiction and correspondence uncannily anticipate psychoanalytic explanations of human behaviour and desire. "How good it is to turn life into a novel," declared Sand. Jacks has succeeded in turning the novel that is Sand's life into a fast-paced, informative and striking biography with a romantic realism that Sand herself would have heartily approved. --Rachel Holmes

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George Sand

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