Read more
Zusatztext “Focused and engaging.”– The New York Times Book Review “An eloquent and straightforward life story…. Lucid and sympathetic.”– Elle "An illuminating and entertaining book…. Emotionally engaging."– The Sunday Times (London) Informationen zum Autor Belinda Jack is fellow and Lecturer in French at Christ Church, Oxford. Klappentext The author of classic novels including Indiana and Lélia, George Sand is perhaps better known for her unconventional life. Belinda Jack unravels the many facets of this writer who counted among her friends and lovers everyone from Chopin and Liszt to Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sand defied convention by writing novels; but the fact that she was a cigar-smoking cross-dresser who took male and female lovers, declared marriage "barbarous,” and championed socialism made her a legend. Allowing Sand's voice to be heard, but wise enough to question it, Jack presents a riveting study of a woman raised by her aristocratic grandmother and her prostitute mother, and whose life and work were forever fueled by rival worlds. Leseprobe Introduction There is something wonderfully excessive about George Sand's life and writing. I was astonished and delighted when I first discovered her in my teens. She seemed a fantastically vampish yet androgynous figure, and her sexuality struck me as peculiarly intriguing. I found portraits of her: drawings, engravings, and paintings. She is beautiful only in some, but her eyes are always beguiling, disproportionately large, almost black, and invariably mysterious. The photographs of her in later life are full of character: there is remarkable strength in her face, but also the suggestion that she has suffered. Then there are cartoons, quite as vicious as today's cartoons of media figures caught up in scandal. I wondered particularly about the hidden life of George Sand, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 and died in 1876. She is France's most famous nineteenth-century woman writer, but she is best known as the famous lover of the celebrated Chopin, and variously described not in relation to her writing but rather as a frigid, bisexual, nymphomaniac, or "Good Lady of Nohant." Were there not, the indignant primitive feminist in me asked, contradictions and prejudices to be explored and explained? And what inner compulsion explained her quite extraordinary productivity? How had she maintained her prolific writing while enjoying such an active, highly colourful, and daring private life? In short, the origin of this biography was my discovery, twenty years ago, of a possible role model, at once intriguing, inspiring, and subversive. The woman I found out more about then is not the woman I know now. But the familiar caricature I had first encountered is not altogether fanciful: exaggeration lends itself naturally to parody and comic representation. And there is something exaggerated about almost every aspect of her life. Her long love affair with Chopin was only one of a large number of affairs with well-known figures of her times, mostly writers, mostly some years younger than Sand. Indeed most of the notable artistic figures of her day became her friends, often despite themselves, visiting her at her glorious country estate at Nohant, in Berry, or in Paris. Most were surprised by the unassuming, positively shy woman who received them. A small but representative selection from the veritable roll call of famous nineteenth-century men who were her friends includes musicians, Franz Liszt most notably, French writers including Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Vigny, Chateaubriand, and Zola, and writers from numerous other countries, Heinrich Heine, Henry James, Browning (and his wife), Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, as well as painters, Eugène Delacroix being the best known. The engraver Alexandre Damien Manceau, the last of her great loves, wa...
