The woman who invented George Sand

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand, Fiona Sampson, Doubleday, £22

Fiona Sampson’s book about George Sand is very good. This is not really a surprise. Sampson is a good writer, writing about perhaps one of the greatest – and most overlooked – of all writers. Given that this year marks the 150th anniversary of Sand’s death, the timing is perfect.

Much of the English novel – Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles – owes a great debt to the more than 70 works penned by George Sand. In September 1866, she sent a crate weighing as much as a small person to Gustave Flaubert. It contained her complete works. Flaubert was amused: he had so far published just two novels, and had only recently met Sand at a dinner party. When Sand died, he said of attending her funeral: ‘It seemed to me that I was burying my mother a second time.’ Victor Hugo delivered the eulogy. She was a fixture of the Paris literary scene for decades, and one of the most influential writers of her generation. Yet outside France, she has been largely forgotten. Sampson’s biography is a serious, welcome attempt to fix this lamentable fact.

Sand’s life is a goldmine. Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin in 1804, Sand’s origins were complicated: on her father’s side, deeply aristocratic, with links to the monarchy; on her mother’s, resolutely not. Her mother, Sophie-Victoire, had been a courtesan before her marriage, baldly described by Sampson as a ‘sex worker’. This description is not inaccurate per se, but it does not quite capture the nuance. Sand’s early years were marked by loss: a baby brother who died, her father killed in a riding accident shortly after, persistent conflict between her remaining guardians – her chaotic mother and formidable grandmother – before a period of relative stability at her grandmother’s château at Nohant, in the heart of rural France.

From there the story gathers pace. A convent education in Paris. A possible crush on her own half-brother. A disastrous marriage to Casimir Dudevant. A move to Paris with Jules Sandeau. A first novel under a shared pseudonym, and then, in 1832, the publication of Indiana. This novel changed everything. Under the name G. Sand, it presented marriage as a form of domestic captivity and articulated a powerful desire for autonomy. When the author was revealed to be a young, separated woman living unconventionally in Paris, the reaction intensified. ‘In Paris, Mme Dudevant is dead. But George Sand is known as a vigorous fellow,’ she wrote at age 28. The transformation from Aurore to George – the transformation at the heart of Sampson’s work – was nearly complete.

What followed was a career of extraordinary productivity and influence, her 70 works including novels, essays, plays and treatises. She conducted friendships with Victor Hugo, Balzac, Delacroix, Liszt and many more. Her most famous relationship was with Chopin. Their decade together, much of it spent at Nohant, produced some of his most celebrated music. Sampson’s handling of this relationship is particularly strong, offering a perspective that feels fresh and illuminating.

Sampson’s tone is one of the book’s greatest strengths: brisk, modern, and clear. She has a keen eye for detail and for moments that bring the past into focus. The image of Sand meeting her future (abusive) husband over ice cream at the Grand Café Tortoni, for instance, is both vivid and oddly intimate.

A dry wit runs through the prose. When a man about to cheat on his fiancée with Sand dismisses his fiancée as lacking ideas, Sampson notes that he is simply joining a familiar chorus of men who say their partners ‘don’t understand them’, but points out that the young Aurore does not yet know enough of life to see this as the lowly cliché that it is. The reminder that some of Aurore’s bad decisions are based on the fact that she ‘does not yet know she will become George Sand’ creates a pleasing dramatic irony that runs throughout the book.

Sampson’s research is thorough, and engages seriously with Sand’s body of work – that ‘stupendous quantity of writing’. One of the most interesting questions is that of self-invention. Sampson reminds us that even letters and autobiographical writing should be treated as narrative. With this in mind, we may find Sand to be more fully present in her fiction than in her ‘non-fiction’.

For all its strengths, Becoming George is not without its flaws. The early chapters, though rich in detail, feel less original. They lean heavily on Sand’s own account in Histoire de ma vie, and at times it feels like a retelling rather than a reinterpretation. There are also inconsistencies in tone. Sampson is at her best when she is clear and observant, but occasionally her voice slips into something more dismissive. Describing Sand’s emotional letters in terms that reduce them to being ‘hormonal’ feels unnecessary. What love letter – or passionate personal letter of any kind – is not written ‘full of hormonal’ feeling? The remark about Sand not quite having got her figure back after children and having become, in Sampson’s phrase ‘something of a little dumpling’, is where her biting wit seems to overreach.

More broadly, there is a tension in Sampson’s approach with respect to Sand herself. At times she seems to frame Sand’s choices as frustrating acts of self-sabotage. Yet it is precisely this refusal to conform, this dedication to desire and impulsivity, that makes Sand so compelling to read about. The very episodes that might appear ‘across the line’ are central to what makes her fascinating, to me at least. Would I love George Sand as much if she had not blabbed about her disappointing one-night stand with Prosper Mérimée? Or had an affair with the curly-haired doctor summoned to treat her lover Alfred de Musset in a Venice hotel? Probably not. There is this mixture of admiration and admonishment in Sampson’s tone which jars a bit, an example being when she refers to ‘the various problems she [Sand] created when she broke open her marriage’. I would never live my life as George Sand lived hers, but she blazed very brightly, was a force of nature and lived on her own terms, and this is certainly part of her appeal. Sampson is fairly forgiving with the choices of the innocent Aurore, but she is quite hard on the fully formed George Sand.

These criticisms are relatively minor in the context of what is an absorbing biography of a fascinating woman. And Sand’s legacy is vast. She wrote prolifically, engaged politically, and shaped the literary landscape of her time. That her influence persists while her name fades is a discrepancy that deserves correction. Sampson’s treatment broadly does her justice. It is timely, intelligent, and often deeply enjoyable. If it does not resolve every tension in its portrayal, it succeeds in something more important. It restores George Sand to view as a figure of energy, irreverence and genuine talent.

In 1876, as Flaubert stood at her funeral, he wept twice. Once at the sight of her granddaughter’s eyes, so like her own. And once as her coffin passed. The rain fell softly. It seemed, he said, like a scene from one of her novels.

It is time more readers knew why.