George Sand

About this book

George Sand was the most famousand most scandalouswoman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer she was enormously prolificshe wrote more than ninety novels thirty-five plays and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter Solange. Drawing on archival sourcesmuch of it neglected by Sands previous biographersElizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sands writing and defined her life. Why was Sands relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about womens liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sands identity Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange Sands mother and grandmother and Sands own protagonists whose stories amplify her own.