Friday, July 11, 2008

George Sand (1804-1876)


Born: July 1, 1804

Place of Birth : Paris, France

Died: June 9, 1876

Place of Death : Nohant, France

Known As : French author

The French novelist George Sand was one of the most successful female writers of the nineteenth century.

Every night from midnight until dawn, George Sand covered her daily quota of twenty pages with her large, tranquil writing, never crossing out a line. All her novels are love stories in which her romantic idealism unfolds in a realistic setting.

The early works by George Sand are novels of passion, written to lessen the pain of her first love affairs. Indiana (1832) has as its central theme woman's search for the absolute in love. Valentine (1832) depicts an upper-class woman, unhappily married, who finds that a farmer's son loves her. Lélia (1854) is a lyrical but searching confession of the author's own physical coldness. Lélia is a beautiful woman loved by a young poet, but she can show him only motherly affection.

Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840), Consuelo (1842–1843), and Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine (1847) are typical novels of this period for the author. She sympathized in these novels with the difficult lives of the worker and the farmer. She also wrote a number of novels devoted to country life, most produced during her retreat to Nohant. La Mare au diable (1846), La Petite Fadette (1849), and Les Maîtres sonneurs (1852) are typical novels of this genre.

As George Sand grew older, she spent more and more time at her beloved Nohant and gave herself up to the gentle, peaceful life she created for herself there, the entertainment of friends, the staging of puppet shows, and most of all to her grandchildren. Though she had lost none of her vital energy and enthusiasm, she grew less concerned with politics. Her quest for the absolute in love had led her through years of stormy affairs to reaching a tolerant and universal love—of God, of nature, and of children. She died in Nohant on June 9, 1876.

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