Born: 1 July 1804, France
Died: 8 June 1876
Country most active: France
Also known as: Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
George Sand, the nom de plume of Armandine L. A. (Dupin) Dudevant, a French novelist, born in Paris. Her earlier years were spent at Nohant, one of the loveliest districts of France, where she imbibed that passion for rural life which always characterized her. She was persuaded by her parents in 1822 to marry Casimir Dudevant, a country squire. Nine years she endured, what was to her, matrimonial martyrdom; then a formal separation was agreed upon, and she proceeded to Paris with her two children, to whom she was devoted.
She now became associated with Jules Sandeau, from the first half of whose name her pseudonym was taken, and in 1832 she brought out her first important novel, Indiana, which created a furore of interest, and had a brilliant success, though it excited much criticism by its extreme views on social questions. From now on, during a period of forty years, this most prolific of woman writers poured forth a steady stream of literary production, her complete works, when published in Paris amounting to 120 volumes. She wrote with the rapidity of Walter Scott and the regularity of Anthony Trollope. For years her custom was to retire to her desk at ten p.m., and not rise from it till five a.m.
Her life was as strange and adventurous as any of her novels, which were for the most part idealized versions of the multifarious incidents of her career. In her self-revelations she followed Rousseau, her first master in style, but while Rousseau in his Confessions darkened all the shadows, George Sand is the heroine of her story, often frail and faulty, but always a woman more sinned against than sinning. Her curious existence has been described as “a youth of dream, a womanhood of racket and license, and an old age of laborious calm.”
She was more or less intimately associated at various times with a number of famous men, notably Alfred de Musset, the poet, and Frederic Chopin, the composer. She died at Nohant where she had spent her childhood. To a youth and womanhood of storm and stress had succeeded an old age of serene activity and then of calm decay. Her nights were spent in writing, which seemed in her case a relaxation from the real business of the day, playing with her grandchildren, gardening, conversing with her visitors – it might be Balzac or Dumas or Matthew Arnold – or writing long letters to Sainte-Beuve or Flaubert.
George Saintsbury, the English critic, says:
“The popularity of George Sand like that of most very voluminous authors, has sunk considerably since her death. Nor have critical estimates invariably agreed about her. The one thing which both friends and foes accord her is the possession of a most remarkable style, and to this gift may be added a faculty of imagination which always idealised the subject and treatment to the point necessary to fix the work as literature.”
Sainte-Beauve, her intimate friend for more than thirty years, but never her lover, wrote:
“In the great crises of action her intellect, her heart and her temperament are at one. She is concerned for universal happiness and takes thought for the improvement of mankind – the last infirmity and most innocent mania of generous souls. Her works are in very deed the echo of our times. Wherever we were all wounded and stricken her heart bled in sympathy, and all our maladies and miseries evoked from her a lyric wail.”
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
DUDEVANT, AMANTINE-AURORE-DUPIN, better known as George Sand, the most remarkable French woman of our time, was born in the province of Berry, within the first ten years of the present century. A royal descent is claimed for her, through her paternal grandmother, a daughter of Marshal Saxe, well known to be a son of Augustus the Second, King of Poland. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was an officer in the Imperial service. Dying young, he left his daugher to the care of her grand-mother, by whom she was brought up, á la Rousseau. At the age of fourteen she was transferred to the aristocratic convent of the Dames Anglaises, in Paris; the religious reaction which followed the restoration, rendering some modification of Madame Dupin’s philosophical system of education necessary. Here the ardent excitable imagination of the young Amantine Aurore exhibited itself in a fervour of devotion so extreme as to call for the interposition of her superior. Young, rich, and an orphan, she suffered herself, at the age of twenty, to be led into one of those marriages—called “suitable” by the French—with a retired Imperial officer; an upright, honest, but very dull man. Utterly unsuited to one another, and neither of them willing to make sacrifices to duty, the unhappy pair struggled on through some years of wretchedness, when the tie was snapt by the abrupt departure of Madame Dudevant, who fled from her husband’s roof to the protection of a lover. While living in obscurity with this lover, her first work, “Indiana,” was published. This connexion, which had a marked and most deleterious influence upon her mind and career, did not continue long. She parted from her lover, assumed half of his name, and has since rendered it famous by a series of writings, amounting to more than forty volumes, which have called forth praise and censure in their highest extremes.
Madame Dudevant’s subsequent career has been marked by strange and startling contrasts. Taking up her residence in Paris, and casting from her the restraints and modesty of her sex, she has indulged in a life of license, such as we shrink from even in man. Step by step, however, her genius has been expanding, and working itself clear of the dross which encumbered it. Her social position having been rendered more endurable by a legal separation from her husband, which restored her to fortune and independence, a healthier tone has become visible in her writings, the turbulence of her volcanic nature is subsiding, and we look forward, hopefully to the day of better things. She has lately written a dramatic piece, called “Francois le Chamfri,” which has been highly successful in Paris, and is represented to be a production of unexceptionable moral character.
Much has been said and written of the intention of Madame Dudevant’s early productions. That she had any “intention” at all, save the almost necessary one of expressing the boiling tide of emotions which real or fancied wrongs, a highly poetic temperament, and violent passions engendered, we do not believe Endowed with genius of an order capable of soaring to the most exalted heights, yet eternally dragged to earth by the clogs of an ill-regulated mind, never disciplined by the saving influences of moral and Christian training, she dipped her pen into the gall and wormwood of her own bitter experience, and we have the result. We cannot say that works have an immoral intention, which contain as much that is high, good, and elevating, as there is of an opposite character. We might as soon declare those arrows pointed by design, which are flung from the bow of a man stung and wounded to blindness.
Of their tendency, we cannot speak so favourably. Among her thousands of readers, how many are there who pause, or are capable of pausing, to reflect that life is seen from only one point of view by this writer, and that that point was gained by Madame Dudevant when she lost the approval of her own conscience, abjured her womanhood, and became George Sand!
However, we are willing—ay, more, we are glad—to hope Madame Dudevant will henceforth strive to remedy the evils she has caused, and employ her wonderful genius on the side of virtue and true progress. To do this effectually, she must throw by her miserable affectation of manhood, and the wearing of man’s apparel, which makes her a recreant from the moral delicacy of her own sex, without attaining the physical power of the other. Surely, one who can write as she has lately written, must be earnestly seeking for the good and true. It was, probably, this which led her, in the Revolution of 1848, to connect herself with the Socialist Party; but she will learn, if she has not already, that political combinations do not remove moral evils. Her genius should teach truth, and inspire hearts to love the good; thus her Influence would have a mightier effect on her country than any plan of social Inform political expediency could devise. That she does now write in this manner, a glance at one of her late works will show. “La Mare au Diable,” (The Devil’s Pond,) notwithstanding its name, is as sweet a pastoral as we have ever read. There is a naive tenderness in its rural pictures, which reminds one of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” while its feminine purity of tone invests it with a peculiar charm.
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Marie Aurore Dudevant was brought up by her grandmother and, at the age of twenty, married a man who was utterly incapable of understanding her. She fled to Paris, where she led a life of liberty and pleasure, but her exalted and poetic genius procured her universal glory. La Mare au Diable, Le Lys dans la Vallee, Consuelo and 40 other volumes are proof of her amazing prolific talent. To her literary fame is added the feminine glory of having been loved by Balzac, Chopin, Liszt, Heine and Musset. Romantic in all her ideas and manners, she lived a life of a thousand wonders in her search for happiness, and no portrait of her can excel the tribute paid to her by Mrs. Fiske: “Only her own hundred odd books can give even a faint understanding of this amazing woman. Among all women — this creature of a thousand colors — grande dame and Bohemian — gamine and daughter of kings, soubrette and philosopher, pagan and religieuse, housefrau and mad lover, everyday hard worker and impassioned dreamer, simpleton and sage, poseuse and farm
woman, tragedy queen and imp of mischief, Sibyl and ‘big child,’ everything that lives and burns and flames in man or woman, George Sand the generous, the kind, the simple. What she loved best in all the world was kindness.”