George Sand, one of the most courageous and controversial figures in European literary history, is being remembered on the 150th anniversary of her death. Victor Hugo called her 'an immortal', Gustave Flaubert 'one of the great figures of France', and Matthew Arnold said she was 'the greatest spirit in our European world [since] Goethe'. Yet Sand was also a cross-dressing, cigar-smoking divorcee who faced relentless attacks from contemporaries like Charles Baudelaire, who labelled her 'a latrine', and Friedrich Nietzsche, who called her 'a dairy cow'.
Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil in 1804 to a Paris sex worker and an aristocratic cavalry officer, Sand's legitimacy was secured by a shotgun marriage. Her own marriage at 18 to an alcoholic boor failed within a decade. She left for literary Paris with a lover, Jules Sandeau, and adopted the male pen name 'George Sand'—a gleeful chopping down of 'Georges'. Her male pseudonym was not unusual for the time, but it allowed her to move freely in a man's world.
Sand published 70 novels, travel writing, criticism, autobiography, political polemic and visionary essays on the interconnectedness of the natural world. She founded several politically progressive periodicals and became a highly successful playwright. Her writing was radical for its time, focusing on emotional, idealistic stories about social injustice, with women and children at the centre. Her bestselling 1832 debut Indiana tackled the cruelty of arranged marriages.
Sand's flamboyant promiscuity made her notorious. She wore men's clothes, a habit from her teenage years for riding, which in Paris became a costume proclaiming her status as one of the literary 'boys'. Her mostly heterosexual flings included a one-night stand with Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen, and a series of relationships with younger, financially dependent male partners. The adventures stopped in 1838 when she became involved with Frédéric Chopin, though their relationship was not happy.
Sand was also a grandmother of fiction of social exclusion, turning her attention to the rural poor in her 40s with novels like The Devil's Pool, Little Fadette and François le Champi, decades before Thomas Hardy explored Wessex. The Brontë sisters imitated and admired her, and her legacy includes the normalisation of placing women and children at the centre of their own stories.
