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The Invention of George Sand
by Fiona Sampson
A long-overdue reappraisal of the groundbreaking nineteenth-century writer who reshaped the literary and social norms of her age.
By the age of thirty, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a Paris garret had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her novels were outselling even Victor Hugo. Her enormous and radical corpus would grow to include seventy novels, travel writing, plays, autobiography, and political writing. But despite this prodigious talent, Sand was simultaneously a figure of scandal. Cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women.
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 Fryderyk Chopin to Gustave Flaubert, and Alfred de Musset to Eugène Delacroix―form part of her dialogue with the world around her: a dialogue that's intrinsic to writing itself? To what extent do we invent ourselves? And what can we learn, from Sand's life and art, about how writers in particular invent themselves, and are reinvented by the society around them?
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Sand's death, and Becoming George is a fitting celebration of her literary genius―as well as the first new biography in nearly twenty-five years. Award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates an artistic and intellectual giant who still speaks to us today. Brilliantly prescient―about ecology, politics, society, gender―George Sand was truly a figure ahead of her time.
"Fiona Sampson beautifully describes the 'self-invention' of George Sand, the Romantic period's most famous woman writer, and in the process paints a vivid portrait of a world in the throes of political and artistic revolution." ―Maurice Samuels, author of Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair
"The inventive spirit of Becoming George is a match for George Sand's focus on performance throughout this life on the feminist frontier. Fiona Sampson teases out facts with a stimulating readiness to think, as when she finds a 'sexualised maternity' in Sand's choice of boy-men. Sampson writes with eloquent empathy, making sense of Sand's changing image. As Sand said of Rousseau, thought and language are gloriously clear. Immersion in the present with the future in constant view ensures that we live in the moment with George Sand as her life opens up." ―Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
This information about Becoming George was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, a writer, and Romanticist. Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College University of Oxford, she has received numerous national and international literary awards and been published in thirty-eight languages. Becoming George completes a trilogy of acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley, a London Times Book of the Year, was followed by Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times bestseller, and finalist for the Plutarch Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography.
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