Becoming George

What can we learn from the way George Sand lived? Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - Sand scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society. 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 Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself? In Becoming George , award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.