George Sand is the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, a 19th century French novelist and memoirist. Sand is best known for her novels Indiana, Lélia, and Consuelo, and for her memoir A Winter in Majorca, in which she reflects on her time on the island with Chopin in 1838-39. A champion of the poor and working classes, Sand was an early socialist who published her own newspaper using a workers' co-operative and scorned gender conventions by wearing men's clothing and smoking tobacco in public. George Sand died in France in 1876.
This novel reverses the Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut and gives Manon's helplessly amoral character to a man, Leoni. Juliette, the girl he seduces, becomes the exponent of undying, endless, forgiving love. The setting is the demimonde of Venice, and the is thick with sinister figures whose influence drags the miserable lovers down.
Lucrezia Floriani, a worldly 30-year-old actress and the mother of 4 children with 3 different fathers, meets and falls in love with Prince Karol, a moody, introspective aristocrat.
These selections from George Sand's journals form an integrated whole and show Sand as a woman, lover, mother, artist, politician, chatelaine, and friend. Sand's journal writing is thought by many to be her most expressive and natural; here the artist's most complex and interesting character is revealed: George Sand herself.
By George Sand, Translated by Sue Huseman, Translated by Charron Sylvie
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Cloth
Published Aug 2005
In The Marquise, George Sand reacts against the tradition of the libertine novels of the 19th century by making the Marquise the narrator of the story, thus giving her control of the action. Sand deconstructs the myth of the seducer by making Lelio, the hero, the subject of the Marquise's desire. Pauline's two female protagonists represent diametrically opposed 19th-century female roles. Pauline is trapped by the bourgeois strictures of the time, while her friend, Laurence, an actress and intellectual, is independent both financially and emotionally.
This is George Sand's second novel. Like Indiana, her first, it explores the relationship between men and women. Valentine, an aristocratic girl, falls despearately in love with Benedict, the son of a poor farmer. Again, like Indiana, this novel challenges preconceived masculine assumptions about woman's role in society. In loving Benedict, Valentine rebels against her family and her class.
