ABSTRACT
Born in 1804, Armandine Aurore Lucile Dupin grew up in the rural department of the Indre, in the Berry area of France. Her father was descended distantly from the King of Poland and Louis XVIII, but her mother’s origins were humble. In 1830 she left her husband, Baron Casimir Dudevant, and moved to Paris. When she produced a novel, Rose et Blanche, with her lover, Jules Sandeau, she used the pseudonym ‘Jules Sand’ to avoid scandal. In 1832, she wrote her next novel, Indiana, alone, under the name ‘George Sand’.1 She would turn up at all-male newspaper offices sporting short hair and trousers: this androgyny offered her access to places and journalistic anonymity. A life-long commitment to republican socialism prompted her to address crucial themes in mould-breaking ways in her writings, such as property distribution, class relations, artisan communities and revolution. She faced disapproval over her relationships, some of them with well-known creative people, such as the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, and she was regularly demonized by leading intellectuals such as Nietzsche and the famous anarchist thinker Proudhon. But the more she was hated, the more she was read.2 George Sand’s trials and tribulations as an editor/journalist are recorded in detail in her correspondence. She devoted much energy between 1841 and 1849 to launching four periodicals – a literary review, two local newspapers and a national republican political journal – with varying degrees of success. Her journalism reached a zenith during 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe. With 80 novels, 25 volumes of correspondence, ten volumes of autobiography and literary contributions to 47 periodicals and journals, she is still one of the most prolific authors in literary history. She died on 8 June 1876.
