About this ebook
"What a brave man she was," said novelist Ivan Turgenev, "and what a good woman." French writer and feminist Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, aka GEORGE SAND (1804-1876), smoked in public and dressed like a man, carried on scandalous romantic affairs and was an intimate of Chopin and Flaubert...and wrote some of the most intriguing works of 19th-century French literature: novels, plays, autobiographies, literary criticism, and political treatises. This three-volume 1886 collection of her correspondence sheds light on her personality, morality, and ideas on religion, all of which molded the philosophies on women's sexuality and women's freedom that she is famous for today, and aids a deeper understanding of her work and her place in the history of feminism. Volume III opens with an 1866 letter to Alexandre Dumas critiquing his recent work, and ends with one to her doctor, Henri Favre, mere days before her death in 1876, thanking him for his kind ministrations. In between, we discover a portrait of a woman rich in friendship and love. This volume includes numerous letters to Flaubert, her thoughts on the political turmoil of France at the time, and much more.
About the author
George Sand began life as Aurore Dupin, the daughter of a count and a dressmaker. Educated both on her aristocratic grandmother's estate and in a Parisian convent, at 18 she married Casimer Dudevant, a provincial gentleman whose rough temperament was the opposite of her own, and from whom she obtained a separation several years later. At 31 she moved to Paris, where she changed her name and plunged into the bohemian world of French romanticism. Frequently dressed in men's clothing, she participated actively in literary debates, cultural events, and even the revolution of 1848. Sand was friend and correspondent with many of the major artists and writers of her age, including Balzac, Flaubert, and Liszt. Her love affairs with the poet Musset and the composer Chopin were the stuff of legend, chronicled in her own Story of My Life. Sand's immensely popular novels ranged from sentimental stories of wronged women, to utopian socialist fictions, such as her masterpiece in Consuelo, 1842, to explorations of pastoral themes written when she retired, late in life, to her estate in Berry. Though frequently dismissed as overblown or too sentimental, Sand's fiction has recently undergone a revaluation, emerging as an influential body of women's writing. As both a writer and an intellectual personality, Sand is a central figure in nineteenth-century French cultural life. George Sand died in 1876
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