From Publishers Weekly
Danielle Steele would be hard-pressed to concoct a juicer tale than the scandalous life of 19th-century French writer George Sand (1804–1876), revisited in this perceptive and original biography by novelist Harlan (Footfalls, Watershed). Sand, née Aurore Dupin, left her husband and two children in provincial France and successfully launched herself as a self-supporting writer in Paris, donning men's clothing to ease passage into the professional world and taking a pseudonym to protect her aristocratic family's name. Sand took on many lovers, among them poet Alfred de Musset and composer Frédéric Chopin. Yet despite Sand's outward daring, as Harlan shows, she obsessed over her identity, as both a woman and an aristocrat. Based on her interpretation of Sand's letters, Harlan says that this question of identity is at the root of Sand's compulsively prolific writing, which produced scores of novels and plays, and 20,000 letters. Sand may indeed not have been her nobleman father's biological daughter, and her mother was from the lower classes. So, "with a tendency toward self-contradiction," she bounced ambivalently between ideals of feminine submission and emancipation, and sometimes obscured, sometimes flaunted her lineage. Harlan sensitively analyzes the gaps and idiosyncrasies in her subject's heavily self-edited correspondence, autobiography and novels to uncover a fresh portrait of this volatile, imaginative woman of letters. B&w illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"Doubt, dread and enchantment" -- those are the feelings George Sand inspired in Julia Ward Howe and her generation of American women intellectuals. Many of Sand's 80 novels were both praised as instant classics (by the likes of Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde) and damned as immoral. Her life aroused as much admiration or outrage as her writing -- she wore male attire, smoked cigars and conducted brazen love affairs -- and biographies have eclipsed her fiction for today's readers. At least two dozen have preceded Elizabeth Harlan's George Sand, but unlike her predecessors, Harlan, a novelist based in Paris, does not emphasize the romantic myth. Instead, she digs for the truth behind the most controversial episodes in Sand's extraordinary life, such as her strained relations with her mother, her conflicts with her own son and daughter, and her attitude toward the emerging feminist movement.Sand was born Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin in 1804. Her father was a military officer, descended from a king; her mother was virtually a prostitute. After her father's death in 1808, his mother obtained exclusive responsibility for the little girl's upbringing by threatening to disinherit her. The clash between the families plagued Aurore throughout her childhood. At 18, she was pushed into marriage with Casimir Dudevant, who liked to hunt and give orders, while his wife liked literature and the arts and hated to take orders. After a confrontation with him in December 1830, she stormed off in the new year to Paris with her lover, an aspiring writer named Jules Sandeau.At first Sandeau and Aurore collaborated, but he was as shiftless as she was productive, and soon she began writing alone, altering their joint pseudonym to form her influential masculine pen name, George Sand. Two early novels, Indiana (1832) and Lélia (1833), became bestsellers; they attacked marriage and questioned God, and they were obviously autobiographical. From then on, Sand was an international celebrity. Public liaisons with famous men like the Romantic writer Alfred de Musset and the composer Frédéric Chopin only added to her legend.Independence did not simplify Sand's private life. She fought with her husband over money, their property and custody of their two children. She struggled to attend to the children, often abandoning them to the care of others, thereby recreating her own unhappy experience. She wrote furiously, from necessity, because she was always short of cash. She argued with her publishers about contracts and deadlines. She involved herself in left-wing politics during one of the most turbulent periods of history, and lived through the popular uprisings of 1832, 1848 and 1870-71, each one suppressed with a bloody massacre. Even her old age, when she retired to her country estate and became "the Good Lady of Nohant," was marred by alienation from her daughter, Solange.Unlike most of Sand's biographers, Harlan tends to emphasize her subject's failings. Sand's getaway to Venice with her lover Musset in 1833-34 is usually related as romantic adventure, but Harlan focuses on the sad letters from Sand's 10-year-old son, Maurice, unhappily deposited in a boarding school, pleading for sympathy and receiving chilly replies. Similarly, in Harlan's presentation, Sand pushed Solange into a loveless marriage at 18, then replaced her with a more compliant surrogate daughter, once again repeating her own past. Harlan convincingly evokes Sand's family history to explain her capricious and sometimes callous treatment of her children, but the explanation neither justifies the actions nor wins sympathy for Sand. All recent biographers have struggled to explain Sand's attitude toward other women. In 1848, a women's group nominated her to run for public office. She not only refused the nomination, she wrote a scathing denunciation of women's suffrage, the campaign for women's rights and feminism in general. Harlan invokes a fine distinction between "equality feminism" (which holds that women are essentially human beings, entitled to the same rights as men) and "difference feminism" (which sees women as essentially different from men and entitled to special consideration under law) to reconcile Sand's words with her deeds, but the argument rings hollow. Should the writer's deeds matter, or just her words? In Sand's case, at least, her legend has always depended as much on her life as on her writings. Harlan deserves credit for facing some ugly realities obscured by Sand's legend, and this biography will be avidly read and challenged by Sand fans. Harlan leans too far in the other direction, however, omitting or barely mentioning many of Sand's achievements. And she does not make the reader fully appreciate how difficult it was in Sand's day to reconcile the ambitions of a writer with those of a mother, a lover, a bread-winner, a public figure. What remains at the end is more doubt than enchantment. Reviewed by English Showalter Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Review
“Elizabeth Harlan brings to bright life one of the greatest figures who ever wrote her way into history--in all her genius, passion, and flaws. George Sand is irresistible.”--Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University-->


Book Description
An engrossing biography that unravels the mystery of nineteenth-century France’s most prominent woman

George Sand was the most famous--and most scandalous--woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific--she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange.

Drawing on archival sources--much of it neglected by Sand’s previous biographers--Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand’s writing and defined her life. Why was Sand’s relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women’s liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand’s identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand’s mother and grandmother, and Sand’s own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.


From the Inside Flap
"Elizabeth Harlan brings to bright life one of the greatest figures who ever wrote her way into history -- in all her genius, passion, and flaws. George Sand is irresistible." - Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University

About the Author
Elizabeth Harlan is the author of two novels, Footfalls and Watershed. She lives in Paris.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"George Sand was the most famous - and most scandalous - woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific - she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust, but is more often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Alfred de Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange." Drawing on archival sources - much of it neglected by Sand's previous biographers - Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand's writing and defined her life. Why was Sand's relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women's liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand's identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand's mother and grandmother, and Sand's own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly