GEORGE SAND: A WOMAN'S LIFE WRIT LARGE

Introduction There is something wonderfully excessive about George Sand's life and writing. I was astonished and delighted when I first discovered her in my teens. She seemed a fantastically vampish yet androgynous figure, and her sexuality struck me as peculiarly intriguing. I found portraits of her: drawings, engravings, and paintings. She is beautiful only in some, but her eyes are always beguiling, disproportionately large, almost black, and invariably mysterious. The photographs of her in later life are full of character: there is remarkable strength in her face, but also the suggestion that she has suffered. Then there are cartoons, quite as vicious as today's cartoons of media figures caught up in scandal. I wondered particularly about the hidden life of George Sand, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 and died in 1876. She is France's most famous nineteenth-century woman writer, but she is best known as the famous lover of the celebrated Chopin, and variously described not in relation to her writing but rather as a frigid, bisexual, nymphomaniac, or "Good Lady of Nohant." Were there not, the indignant primitive feminist in me asked, contradictions and prejudices to be explored and explained? And what inner compulsion explained her quite extraordinary productivity? How had she maintained her prolific writing while enjoying such an active, highly colourful, and daring private life? In short, the origin of this biography was my discovery, twenty years ago, of a possible role model, at once intriguing, inspiring, and subversive. The woman I found out more about then is not the woman I know now. But the familiar caricature I had first encountered is not altogether fanciful: exaggeration lends itself naturally to parody and comic representation. And thereissomething exaggerated about almost every aspect of her life. Her long love affair with Chopin was only one of a large number of affairs with well-known figures of her times, mostly writers, mostly some years younger than Sand. Indeed most of the notable artistic figures of her day became her friends, often despite themselves, visiting her at her glorious country estate at Nohant, in Berry, or in Paris. Most were surprised by the unassuming, positively shy woman who received them. A small but representative selection from the veritable roll call of famous nineteenth-century men who were her friends includes musicians, Franz Liszt most notably, French writers including Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Vigny, Chateaubriand, and Zola, and writers from numerous other countries, Heinrich Heine, Henry James, Browning (and his wife), Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, as well as painters, Eugene Delacroix being the best known. The engraver Alexandre Damien Manceau, the last of her great loves, was unique in giving her both love and friendship: a combination no earlier lover had offered. One of her most intense, abandoned, and desperate love affairs was, however, with a woman, Marie Dorval, one of the most famous and beautiful actresses of the Parisian stage. They met in January 1833, when Sand was in her late twenties and Dorval in her mid-thirties. Sand had seen her act, and experienced an uncanny sense of recognizing her own suppressed emotions in all of Dorval's movements, expressions, and tones of voice. It was as though her soul had materialized and appeared on the stage before her. The two women were opposites, and each was strongly drawn to the other. Sand wrote to Dorval. The love affair that followed aroused outrage and jealousy and, needless to say, excited widespread and malicious gossip. Sand's dress also drew attention: this was not altogether her intention. She cross-dressed, sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes for fun, and sometimes to see the world, and be treated, differently. She also had a penchant for exotic costumes. Smoking was a pleasure that she indulged in public at a timeBELINDA ELIZABETH JACK is the author of 'GEORGE SAND: A WOMAN'S LIFE WRIT LARGE', published 1999 under ISBN 9780701166472 and ISBN 0701166479.