George Sand

 Of George Sand, I have read only her novel Indiana. That during my stay in prison. About all I recall is that she was not as ponderous as Victor Hugo (who I read in high school) or as brittle as Emile Zola (although I do like Zola, more than I had expected).

What little I knew about Sand was her connection with Chopin and from watching Impromptu.

Reading Brave, visionary and queer: the Bohemian brilliance of author George Sand ( The Guardian) put some things in perspective and helped with understanding Indiana.

She makes it look so simple. Her writing is beautiful, expressive and easy to read. Yet her technique was radical. Emotional, idealistic writing about social injustice was something new. She wrote intimately, avoiding the panoramas of Balzac or Dickens. Her stories were full of detail about lived experience. And, starting with her bestselling 1832 debut Indiana, about the cruelty of arranged marriages, she placed women and children at the centre of their own stories.

That we now take this for granted is part of Sand’s legacy: the Brontë sisters, for example, imitated and admired her. A grandmother of fiction of social exclusion, in her 40s she turned her attention to the rural poor. Again she was ahead of her time, producing novels such as The Devil’s Pool, Little Fadette and François le Champi decades before Thomas Hardy explored Wessex.

Compared to Dickens, her prose is sprightly. Whatever reservations rattle around in my head about her book may have more to do with the distance in time. The same happens with me and Jane Austen when her topic is not money. 

One last thing to think about before tracking down her novels:

Genius fascinates us by being made, not born, yet claiming to be the opposite. The additional obstacles women have historically overcome make their processes of self-invention particularly clear. But Sand isn’t just a history lesson. Everything that made her the pioneering exception in her lifetime makes her astonishingly relevant today. She simply refused to do what was expected of her. Storming the male bastions of literary Europe, she blazed a trail for future female artists from Elizabeth Gaskell to Louise Bourgeois to Taylor Swift. Her subversive adoption of the male writer’s uniform – from cigar and top hat to spats and riding coat – is brave and funny. It queers the notion of authority.

It’s also part of a shapeshifting refusal to be pigeonholed. Whether as the consummate professional turning in copy to editors who relied on her, or the loving grandmother tutoring two generations of her own family, she did it all. She campaigned for causes including an end to arranged marriage, the Revolutionary progressives of 1848, and the rights of a young rape victim with mental disabilities. She gave her earliest heroine, Indiana, global majority heritage. In the Val de Loire region of France where she grew up, and later helped the local poor, she was known as the Good Lady of Nohant.

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