ABSTRACT
The identity constructed by an autobiography is necessarily double, composed of a young protagonist and a narrating voice whose presence is much more strongly felt than in fiction. Some autobiographers ignore the second temporal level and write about their younger selves as though from some fixed point outside time like the extra-diagetic narrator in a novel, but others, and George Sand is one of them, give us a strong sense of a double movement forward, of two selves advancing in parallel. Certain contemporary feminist theorists have spoken of a kind of writing whose distinctiveness would lie in its escape from the artificially ordering structures of 'patriarchal' language. Long before the emergence, then, of contemporary feminist theory, writers and readers have felt that there was something different about women's language, specifying features that many women have in common and few men—and have included Sand.
