George Sand Book

An engrossing biography that unravels the mystery of nineteenth-century Franceâ??s most prominent woman George Sand was the most famousâ??and most scandalousâ??woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolificâ??she 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 sourcesâ??much of it neglected by Sandâ??s previous biographersâ??Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sandâ??s writing and defined her life. Why was Sandâ??s relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about womenâ??s liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sandâ??s identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sandâ??s mother and grandmother, and Sandâ??s own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.Elizabeth Harlan is the author of two novels, Footfalls and Watershed. She lives in Paris.Read More