Overview

Cigar smoking, gender-nonconforming, bisexual, polyamorous - and the intellectual equal of any man - George Sand was the beating heart of the Paris literary scene. Award-winning Fiona Sampson MBE reassesses this uniquely modern figure. Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself - cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day - from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.

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9781529924336

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Reviews

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo ‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire ‘An abundance of milk[; a] dairy cow with a “beautiful style”.’ Friedrich Nietzsche 'One had to know her as I did to know how much of the feminine was in that great man, the immensity of tenderness in that genius. Her name will live in unique glory as one of the great figures of France.' Gustave Flaubert 'My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress. […] Be reassured, I do not aspire to the dignity of man. It seems to me too laughable to be much preferable to the servility of woman. But I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which you alone believe you have the right to enjoy. […] So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.' George Sand * The words of Sand and her contemporaries *

Author Information

Fiona Sampson is a poet, who has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She has received a Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize, the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia), Writer's Awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, and from the Society of Authors, and is a Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature. She works as a critic and editor, and contributes regularly to the Guardian, Irish Times, Sunday Times, Independent and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2017 she was awarded an MBE for services to Literature and the Literary Community.

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