The Most Scandalous Author in 19th-Century France

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Episode: The Most Scandalous Author in 19th-Century France Host: Dr. Kate Lister
Guest: Fiona Sampson, author of Becoming: The Invention of George Sand
Date: February 27, 2026

---

Overview

This episode of "Betwixt The Sheets" dives into the riveting, unconventional life and literary achievements of George Sand—a trailblazing 19th-century French writer who scandalized and captivated her society through her novels, her gender-defying persona, and a series of infamous love affairs (including with Frédéric Chopin). With returning guest and Sand’s latest biographer Fiona Sampson, host Kate Lister explores why George Sand, once at the center of European culture, has been overshadowed in the historical canon, overshadowed by tales of trousers and lovers rather than her monumental literary output and progressive values.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Who Was George Sand?

• Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil to a lineage marked by both aristocratic wealth and poverty, as well as a recurring motif of illegitimacy.
• Raised between aristocratic privilege and her mother’s impoverished background, Sand was touched by both privilege and hardship—a duality that deeply influenced her worldview and writing (07:23–10:44).

Quote:
"Classic thing. Her father’s an aristocratic cavalry officer, her mother’s a cool girl from Paris."
— Fiona Sampson (09:01)

2. Sources of Notoriety

• Achieved massive fame in her own time, admired by literary giants like Balzac, Hugo, and the Brontës.
• Her notoriety—wearing men’s clothes, adopting the pen name "George Sand," and her very public love affairs—often overshadowed her artistic achievements in the mind of later generations (04:46–07:06).

Quote:
"She was notorious in her lifetime, but the notoriety was almost like a byproduct of her fame, her literary fame."
— Fiona Sampson (04:46)

3. Early Life and Literary Emergence

• Had a dramatic and sometimes traumatic childhood; lost her father at age four, lived through wartime Europe, and was raised primarily by her grandmother in rural France (13:01–16:31).
• Initially wrote plays and letters as a teenager but did not seriously pursue writing until after her marriage began to fail in her mid-20s.

Quote:
"She’s a late starter... it’s only much later on after she’s been married, years and years later, and the marriage is sort of falling apart, that she’s kind of toying with, oh, what could I do?... Oh, I could try writing some stories. So it’s much, much later."
— Fiona Sampson (16:31)

4. Personal Life: Marriages and Affairs

• Married at 18 to Casimir Dudevant, a local landowner. The marriage was deeply unhappy and marked by domestic violence (25:13–26:14).
• Maintained numerous affairs with younger men—including Jules Sandeau (from whom she derived her pen name), the poet Alfred de Musset, and later the composer Chopin. Sampson notes Sand’s “type” was younger, often frail men—whom she often financially and emotionally supported (20:00–21:08, 39:08–41:19).

Memorable Moment:

• "Sugar mama. Balzac calls her a maternal nymphomaniac."
  — Fiona Sampson (21:08)

• Relationships were not limited to men: had an affair with actress Marie Dorval; their relationship highlights Sand’s complex sexuality and the openness of her circle (37:32–38:42).

5. Becoming "George Sand": Identity, Gender, and Authority

• Began to go by “George Sand” in the early 1830s as she broke into the Paris literary scene—a defensive as much as a performative act, allowing her access to male-dominated spaces (45:12–46:16).
• Wore men’s attire publicly in Paris (though dressed conventionally elsewhere), not to emulate men per se, but to claim their authority and freedom for herself—accessing places forbidden to women and sidestepping harassment:
  • "She likes the idea. Boyhood seems to have to do with freedom." (46:16)
• Sampson notes it wasn’t cross-dressing in a trans sense, but a purposeful queering of the image of female authority (48:35–51:22).

Quote:
"What does a woman look like when she wears the costume of authority? She looks like a man. What does a woman look like when she’s wearing the uniform of being a writer, which is a boy’s uniform?"
— Fiona Sampson (48:43)

6. Major Works and Literary Influence

• Wrote over 70 novels, thousands of letters, plays, and influential essays.
• Her breakthrough novel Indiana (1832) was a sensation: it centered a passionate Creole heroine, critiqued marriage and social oppression, and was fiercely feminist for its time (31:17–32:34).
• Her third novel, Lélia (1833), went further, openly attacking marriage and positioning women’s autonomy at the center—a move that cost Sand the support of some progressive contemporaries (37:09–37:36).
• Later, she pioneered rural fiction and even proto-ecological writing, writing openly about the challenges of rural poverty and the interconnection of humanity and nature (52:30–57:01).

Quote:
"She writes three really influential... novels about the life of poor people in the countryside. So she's moved her attention away from the lives of women to the lives of poor people in the countryside."
— Fiona Sampson (52:30)

7. Relationship with Chopin: Reality vs. Myth

• Her most famous relationship—nine years with composer Frédéric Chopin—was complex; Sampson suggests Chopin was almost certainly gay or bisexual, and the couple’s emotional partnership was partly platonic (41:19–43:39).
• Sand supported Chopin financially and emotionally, helping him focus on composition rather than concertizing.

8. End of Life and Legacy

• Sand lived an unusually long and productive life for her era; after years of public scandal, she settled into a revered matriarchal role and continued to write, advocate, and shape literary culture (52:30–57:01).

Notable Moment:
"She publishes 70 novels, huge success with plays in the Paris equivalent of the West End. She writes travel books, she writes an autobiography... She founds progressive newspapers."
— Fiona Sampson (52:30)

9. Why Did Her Literary Reputation Fade?

• Sampson and Lister reflect on the systemic "attritional work by male critics" that erased or downplayed the achievements of great women writers (57:45–61:33).
• Points to deeply ingrained gender norms, literary gatekeeping, and unconscious biases that value men’s work more, both in the past and still today.

Memorable Quote:
"Even the nicest literary men see themselves in the other with another man and they just don't take women seriously. Profoundly, profoundly still."
— Fiona Sampson (57:45)

---

Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On Sand’s Fading Reputation:
  "We have to keep repeating these names." — Fiona Sampson (07:06)

• On Women’s Authority:
  "What would female authority look like? And George’s answer seems to be... she is dressed as a man but isn’t pretending to be a man." — Fiona Sampson (48:43)

• On Literary Labour:
  "When they talk about the invisible labour of women, this is what they mean." — Kate Lister (30:34)

• On Relationship Patterns:
  "She kind of collects these little younger genius waif and stray types." — Kate Lister (45:00)

• On Enduring Gender Inequality:
  "I think it's attritional work by male critics... Men are the norm and we are othered." — Fiona Sampson (57:45)

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• Introducing George Sand & Her Notoriety: 03:46–07:06
• Family and Childhood: 07:23–14:17
• Early Writing and Entry into Paris Literary Scene: 16:31–18:29, 27:42–30:34
• Marriage and Affairs: 25:13–21:08, 39:08–41:19
• Wearing Trousers and the Symbolism of Authority: 46:16–51:22
• Major Novels & Feminist Themes: 31:17–34:50
• Sand’s Role as Patron & Ecological Writer: 52:30–57:01
• Discussion on George Sand’s Erasure from the Canon: 57:45–61:33

---

Tone & Style

Kate Lister brings warmth, irreverence, and humor to the conversation, keeping the atmosphere lively and relatable while exploring complex historical and feminist issues. Fiona Sampson, a passionate and erudite biographer, contextualizes Sand’s personal and creative decisions, often relating them to patterns still visible in contemporary women’s experiences.

Key Takeaway:
George Sand was a revolutionary writer and cultural figure whose influence was vast and whose disregard for gender norms was as much a radical political act as a personal one. Her eclipse in the historical record is a reminder of the ongoing need to recover women's voices and stories.

---

For more by Fiona Sampson, visit her website or look up her latest book, "Becoming: The Invention of George Sand."

Transcript

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Why choose a sleep number Smart bed.

[Fiona Sampson]

Can I make my site softer?

[Commercial Announcer]

Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler?

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed plus an extra $100 off all mattresses and Saturday only at a sleep number

[Commercial Announcer]

store or sleepnumber.com your new home is now ready. Dr. Horton, America's builder, has new homes that are ready today. With new construction communities throughout the Puget Sound and Central Washington areas And more coming, Dr. Horton has the right home for you at Dr. Horton. We're still building with more construction, more communities and more homes available every day. Tap your screen now or visit drhorton.com to find your new home now ready. Dr. Horton, America's builder, an equal housing opportunity builder.

[Kate Lister]

Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Caden Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. Hello. It's so nice to see you again. But before I can let you go any further into this podcast, I have to tell you this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range on subjects. Used to be an adult, too. Are you fully briefed? Do you feel prepared? Right. Then proceed at your own peril. It is a beautiful day here in the heart of France. It's the mid-1800s. A light breeze plays among the leaves on the trees and the birds are singing. Ah, an idol in a country wrought with revolutions. Yep, plural. We are at the famous Noan, a family estate turned gathering place for the literary and musical and artistic elite. Ooh la la. Here is our host, sitting astride a horse and wearing men's breeches. This is Georges sand. And don't let the name or the posture or the attire fool you. George is a literary icon, a society leader, a revolutionary, and a woman. Ready to find out more? I know I am. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Imagine you wrote a book. No, no, imagine you wrote lots of books, actually. Imagine you wrote over 70 books. You're probably feeling pretty good about yourself, thinking your legacy is complete. There is no doubt in your mind that people will be remembering your work for centuries to come. Nothing could possibly overshadow your artistic genius, except for maybe your clothes. How you dared to wear your trousers. Oh, and your relationships of course. You had an affair with Chopin.

[Fiona Sampson]

Who?

[Kate Lister]

Chopin. Piano guy. Yeah. And as a result of that, your books are gonna be all but forgotten. Well, today on Betwixt the Sheets, I have a returning guest. We've previously had Fiona Sampson on to talk about Mary Shelley, and now she's back to reintroduce to George sand her life, her work, and to set us straight on this literary giant's personal life. Back to 19th century France we go. Let's do it. Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Fiona Sampson. How are you doing?

[Fiona Sampson]

I'm great, thanks, Kate, and thank you for having me back.

[Kate Lister]

Well, of course we're gonna have you back because your latest book launch is imminent and to give it its full tit, becoming the invention of George Sand. How's all that going? Are you excited?

[Fiona Sampson]

I am excited, yes. Thank you, Kate. I mean, last time we were talking about Mary Shelley, and in between, I did a biography of Elizabeth Bat Brownlee. And each time I feel I have to adjust my loyalties. Not only my whole memory and my conceptual compass, but I have to fall in love with each of them. So I'm feeling a little bit as though I'm cheating on Mary and Elizabeth. I'm just about getting into, you know, I'm accepting it's kind of serial monogamy.

[Kate Lister]

I love that I'm with George now. We're with George at the moment. There'll be people listening, I imagine, who don't know the name George sand. Because a strange thing happens with a lot of women throughout history, especially women artists, is they can achieve great fame in their lifetime, but they rarely hold onto it. And George sand seems to be one of those.

[Fiona Sampson]

Kate, you're singing for my song sheet. Exactly this. That's exactly why I worked on Elizabeth Batt Browning, and in a way, almost Mary Shelley, too. Because although everyone's heard of Frankenstein, even a few years ago, I guess, when the book was less of a set text in school, everyone knew Frankenstein, the film, but they kind of forgot this amazing young teenager had written it. And it's the same with George sand for me, because I started life as a classical musician. She's this name who's been part of the kind of cultural wallpaper, in a way. But she's another of these astonishing women, as you rightly say, who are our artistic and literary kind of grandmother and great grandmothers in our tradition, whom we allow to kind of slip through our fingers. And you're. I mean, in her day, she was absolutely a Central cultural figure. She was regarded by all the other. I'm going to say other. Not just. In other words, they weren't the only ones, but all the other great novelists of her time as a great writer, a great novelist. You know, whether it's Balzac or Hugo or Flaubert or big names in this country. I don't know, Matthew Arnold. Big. Big names. I mean, the Bronte sisters adored her work, imitated her. Wuthering Heights is a long. Is very much a kind of. In a way, it's a homage to George Sonde. Of course, it's not. It's a great story. But, you know, Emily Bronte was incredibly influenced by reading Sans, so Sand gave permission to women writers. But she was also incredibly admired. She was notorious in her lifetime, but she was also really the notorious. The notoriety was almost like a byproduct of her fame, her literary fame. She is famous. Oh, what can we say about it to, you know, put her down? Oh, well, we'll find something. Exactly where. Since, as you rightly say, the huge body of work, which I know we'll talk about, the sheer scale of it has vanished and what we remember at most is, oh, wasn't she notorious? Didn't she wear trousers sometimes? Didn't she have an affair with Chopin? That's the most. That most people know. Even people who, you know, maybe not okay in France and maybe not Francophones. And it's tragic because if we assent to that, we're assenting to that happening to that erasure. We're having cancellation. Really, we're assenting to that happening to us in our turn. We have to keep repeating these names.

[Kate Lister]

We do. I mean, being remembered for wearing trousers and shagging Chopin isn't the worst thing in the world. No, but there's so much more that she should be remembered for. So can you paint us a bit of a picture? Who was she? And let's talk about her origins. Where did she come from?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, and thank you. I think she's really interesting for her time. I mean, when you're telling the story of a woman who had a tremendous achievement, kind of against the grain of her society, you have to locate her in that society. And George sand was not born George sand, fairly obviously, because it's a man's name. She was born Amantine Auror Lucille Dupin de Fancoy.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, well done. You sound ever so sexy, Fiona, when you say that.

[Fiona Sampson]

Oh, thank you. I wish. It's a sexy language, isn't it?

[Kate Lister]

It is. It absolutely is. Yes.

[Fiona Sampson]

And by the way, while we're talking about her French, one of the great things about George sand is because she was an autodidact, she writes a really accessible French. You know, it's not a kind of throat clearing, literary stuffy languages like Mary Shelley. It kind of powers through the intervening two centuries with, like real personality and clarity. Yeah, she's a wonderful writer. Anyway, so she's born. She wasn't so unusual in having those three names. And she was called Aurore, by the way. That was the one the family picked all about. She was Aurora Dupin. But the Dupin de Francais is really interesting because it denotes the fact that her father's family was so aristocratic that he was an illegitimate relationship of the family, the aristocrats who owned that huge famous chateau at Chenonceau, the one with the arches that go right across the river. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. I know.

[Kate Lister]

Okay.

[Fiona Sampson]

So immensely wealthy and she herself was kind of bifurcated because. Classic thing. Her father's an aristocratic cavalry officer, her mother's a cool girl from Paris.

[Kate Lister]

That old story.

[Fiona Sampson]

Typical, you know. Yes, exactly, exactly. And Aurora was incredibly lucky that they married. They married a month before she was born. So she was conceived as, you know, they were having. They were living together. But luckily for her, because it meant all sorts of things to do as respectable, it also meant she would inherit, and that turned out to be, you know, formative for her life that she inherited. So she had a kind of security.

[Kate Lister]

A shotgun wedding, obviously.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kate Lister]

A month before. Yeah.

[Fiona Sampson]

I mean, when you're eight months pregnant, I mean, it's kind of fairly apparent, isn't it, what's going on? And what's interesting about that too, is that both her father and her mother had an illegitimate child already. So her father already had an illegitimate son who was being brought up kind of among the servants of his mother household. And Aurora's mother already had a daughter, Caroline. Father, who knows, unknown. So both of them had kind of gone through that before. And maybe that's why this time, maybe they just were in love. And I think they were in love. Just gonna ask you. Yes, well, I've thought a lot about that because Sophie Victoire was obviously many things, including not a great mother and chaotic and so on. But wouldn't she be if you'd had an abusive childhood? Because she was on the streets at 13 at the latest, possibly younger. Wow. Okay. Yeah, she had a. Yeah. Her father died. Her father was a birdcatcher. He used to sell birds along the Paris quays. And then her stepfather was also a birdcatcher, but a more successful one. In other words, he had a stall in a market, real step up, but, you know, he threw the girls out. Sophie Victoire had a sister, so really tough life. She ends up a call girl, she ends up in a chorus. Inverted commas of a review, you know, really not good news. She's a child and she's being, in a sense, trafficked. There's a real clash.

[Kate Lister]

Then he comes from, like, serious, serious money. She was homeless at 13, 14.

[Fiona Sampson]

Exactly. Consistios money. But there's still a zigzag of illegitimacy, because his mother, who was quite a grande dame by the time little Aurore knew her, and by the time, indeed, she ended up bringing up little Auror, she was called Marie Auror de Saxe, and she was the illegitimate daughter of the Marshal of France, the Marshal de Saxe, Maurice de Saxe, who was a kind of hero of France and huge establishment figure. And he in turn was the illegitimate son of the man who went on to be the King of Poland, King Augustus II Poland. So a real. This kind of zip cord of illegitimacy going through the family. And also interesting, I think, on that side, although I'm not sure how much Georges calling her Georges, Aurora. Georges was aware of this, is that the mother of the great Marshal of France was a courtier herself, and she was called Maria Aurora von Koenigsberg, which isn't particularly interesting itself, but she was a literary lady at that very early time, and she was very close to a group around the Swedish as well as the Polish court, where there were some very early women writers. So there's this sense of the. Yeah, this kind of almost encoded. I mean, I don't myself particularly believe in genetic talent as such, but, you know, there's something encoded in the family story that comes down. And then there's her mother, who's, you know, at her most generous. What George says about her, adult George says about her, she could sing very sweetly, you know, she had the soul of an artist. And had she had a proper education and training, she could have been something. But as it was, you know, it was just kind of being on the stage and. Yeah, exactly. And so I kind of, kind of, I would say, latterly, a kind of embitteredness, you know, that kind of bolt talent.

[Kate Lister]

So was it.

[Fiona Sampson]

So this is a schism. And it's also the other thing I guess we just should think of before I shut up on this topic.

[Kate Lister]

Don't shut up. That's what you're here for.

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, you know, I want to talk to you, but is that. This is, you know, revolutionary France. So it's not uncomplicated to be the descendant of Aztecs, to be proud of that, but also perhaps defensive about it. And, you know, this is a time when suddenly the names for everything have suddenly changed. Suddenly there were no longer dukedoms, but department. So suddenly they're not in Berry, the old, you know, dukedom, they're in Andre, the. The new department. Well, they will be when Aurora is four, you know, because I don't think she can be expected to remember much from when she's, you know, a toddler in Paris and there's a revolutionary Canada. The even days, the days of the year. Well, the year starts, the days of the year are all these ridiculous, you know, names of farming implements and so on, which goodness knows how anybody remembered them.

[Kate Lister]

It wasn't very popular, was it, that the revolutionary calendar, where they renamed every day and every month and even the actual. The hours and minutes. So you'd say something like, it's the ploughshare of snowy, the seventh of fish. And it just. What, didn't catch on?

[Fiona Sampson]

No, I mean, goodness knows how they remembered, really.

[Kate Lister]

So was it a happy childhood?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, I think it was, actually. I mean, it was. She had a doting father, big tragedy. When she's just turned four, her father dies in a fall from a horse. The horse is perhaps too much for anyone to handle. And Sophie Victoire always regretted he'd been given it. I mean, regretted he'd been given it before he was thrown and killed. But he was given it as a sort of reward for his military exploits, because this is Napoleon France, he's in the army, so he's the aide de camp for General Joachimura, who is leading Napoleonic forces who go and do lots of atrocities in Spain. So there's that problematic thing as well. And strangely, when Aurora is three, her mother, perhaps she's worried he's been away from her side for too long. She's a little bit worried he might stray or whatever. She takes the little girl and they go to Madrid. This is a Madrid that is, you know, portrayed by Goya. The atrocities and massacres by the Napoleonic forces of unarmed civilians are really dangerous, deeply problematic. But Aurora is only three, and so what she remembers is that they're billeted in a palace and she remembers the palace, okay? She also remembers her little brother is born. Her little brother is born frail. And they make their way back after A few months to France and they're going through the desolation, the horrors of the battlefield. So they are hitching rides with, you know, soldiers who are wounded. I mean, it's just atrocious. You know, there's nothing to drink that isn't polluted with blood. I mean, it's just vile. Yeah, really, really, really traumatic. And perhaps not surprisingly, as is the way of things, the little boy doesn't really survive the journey. He dies shortly after they've arrived. And where they arrive back at is her grandmother's house. So her paternal grandmother, so Marie Aurora

[Kate Lister]

de Saxes, even if she had never done anything apart from grow up and get married and have babies, that is still a hell of a dramatic story that she's been through, even just as a small child. When does she. It's crazy. When does she start writing? Is that something that she'd always done or is that something that she came to a bit later?

[Fiona Sampson]

No, it isn't. And in fact, she's a late starter. So two things happen. One is that when she's 13, she's getting a bit hard for her grandmother to handle because her grandmother ends up bringing her up, as you can imagine, in noon, she's sent off to a Paris convent and actually settles really, really well, becomes very popular. And one of the things that she does there is she starts to write and also put on little plays. And they make her very popular in the convent community, which isn't nuns and pupils. It's also, you know, that high u to a nunnery that the kind of single women, the odd women who are living there. So there's a whole community, it's an enclosed, you know, order. They can't go out. So she puts on plays included by Moliere, but she also writes plays, so there's that. But then her grandmother notices she's acquiring a vocation and quickly whips her away to be a companion back in Niuen, because the idea of the convent was to be a finishing school, not to kind of become a religious. And then there's no sort of sense of continuing being a writer at all on her own terms. She's only 15, 16, you know, she writes letters. But the start of, you know, prolific letter writing. I mean, one of the things about Georgeton is she's so prolific, there is so much to read. I mean, just her letters alone, I mean, literally thousands. So that. So, no, in its only much later on after she's been married, I mean, years, years later, and the marriage is sort of falling apart, that she's kind of toying with, oh, what could I do? Oh, I could paint, do little, decorate friends, kind of bibeloves. I could decorate their snuff boxes and so on. Oh, no, no. I'll try writing some stories. So it's much, much later. It's not till 1830, 1831 that she makes a break for freedom in Paris, by which time she's got two children with a younger man. She's by then 26, which is not old, but of course in the 19th century where everyone seems to start everything so young, it seems old. And she's got this younger lover who's 19, who's a law student and they try writing together.

[Kate Lister]

Who's he? Who's this? Who's this young lover?

[Fiona Sampson]

He's her third lover that we know of by now on George. Right, okay. Her third extramarital lover and he's called Jules Sandeau. And she meets him at the house of a mutual friend, as is so often the case in the local market town is called La Chartre. I mean, it's a fairly. I shouldn't really say this, but fairly undistinguished market town. It's not even nowadays particularly pretty by the standards of, you know, La France profondets. And yet interestingly, it has its own kind of local intellectual community, largely made up of either sort of lawyers and doctors who've gone to Paris, had their education come back, or young men who are students who are going off to Paris and then they come back in the summer and they are there in La Charge. And Georges is introduced by her half brother, the illegitimate hippolyte, to this community. And she's become friends with them. And the three glorious days of July happen in 1813. It's like, oh my God, the country's going through another upheaval. And Georges rides over to the house, which is of course a chateau of one of these friends, Chateau de Coudray, and meets up with what's going on. What's going on and sees in the garden this fair haired youth, Jules Sandeau, sitting under a pear tree, and they start a summer affair.

[Kate Lister]

Easily done.

[Fiona Sampson]

Easily done. Although, you know, not really though.

[Kate Lister]

Was like it wasn't. Is she supposed to be doing this? A well to do girl having it away with young men she finds underneath pear trees, several of them.

[Fiona Sampson]

It puts a whole new spin on Isaac Newton and the apple. Certainly does.

[Kate Lister]

She sounds like a bit of a goer, even from.

[Fiona Sampson]

She was a real goer. Yeah, she was.

[Kate Lister]

This is why we like it.

[Fiona Sampson]

What's Very hard to understand for me is that she had a type, which is a younger man. She, you know, just doesn't have to be my own type. So she has a type that is a younger man.

[Kate Lister]

Like, how much younger? Like, what are we talking? Is it like a bit like.

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, this is only seven years, but 19 to 26 is already. And he sets the template so that by the time she gets together with her final relationship with Alexander Monceau, which, you know, much, much later, who she gets together with when she's 45, he's 30, you know, so just.

[Kate Lister]

Just younger men, then. This isn't like. Like worrying.

[Fiona Sampson]

Young 15 years. I mean, younger men and frail younger men.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, all right.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, they are. Yeah. Anyway, so she falls for jewels, and. And also she has. She looks after them. She tends to look after them financially. And also in practical terms. Sugar mama. Yeah, exactly. She is. Yes, she is. Balzac calls her a maternal nymphomaniac.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, my God. Balzac. Coming from him. My goodness.

[Fiona Sampson]

I know. So, yeah, so it's a little bit. So to my mind, inexplicably, but she falls for Jules Santo. Then, conveniently, in the autumn, when he's gone back to Paris, she discovers her husband's will.

[Kate Lister]

Whoa, whoa. She's married? When did this happen?

[Fiona Sampson]

She got married at 18, so she became an heiress at 17 when her grandmother died, and nine months later, she was married.

[Kate Lister]

Boom. Look at that.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah. Nine months after that, her son is born, and she then has two affairs, and Jules is the third of them. So she's got two kids, both within the marriage, although the second child is probably the result of an affair, but we don't know. Kind of 50 50. So we can't say she is, because we don't know. And since there are no surviving descendants, there can be no, you know, DNA that will ever solve that. There are grandchildren, but there's no generation beyond that.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Fiona and George after this short break. Betwixt us. I have seen the figures, and I know what you like. I'm sure that many of you have already been watching season four of Bridgerton, the period drama from Netflix. And if you are, then you should also be listening to their companion show, Bridgerton, the official podcast. In each episode, beloved television presenter Alison Hammond from the Great British Bake off welcomes cast members and creative voices from the show onto her couch. Alison asks all of our burning questions, dishing the dirty about the spicy romances and the sumptuous, scandalous world of Bridgerton's new series. For instance, what did the cast members really think about that staircase scene? To listen, search for Bridgerton, the Official Podcast in your podcast app. Watch video episodes on Netflix. That's Bridgerton, the Official Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Cambridge University Press, publisher of the Dreaded Pox Sex and Disease in Early Modern London by Olivia Weisser this new book takes you to one of my favourite places, the pox riddled streets of early modern London. The dreaded pox will drag you down alleyways where healers peddle their tinctures, put you in kitchens where sufferers cook up cures and let your eavesdrop on the gossip in the taverns. The fabulous Olivia Weisser uncovers the lives of the poxed elite as well as the maidservants and the sex workers who left few words behind, telling stories of sex workers suffering and stigma and showing how the so called secret disease was a defining feature of 17th and 18th century European life. The new book is out now and listeners can get 20% off using the code [e-mail] Dreadedpox

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

we all prefer things a certain way. Like groceries. If you want groceries just how you

[Fiona Sampson]

like them, you gotta try Instacart.

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart get groceries just how you like. Why choose a sleep number Smart bed?

[Fiona Sampson]

Can I make my site softer?

[Commercial Announcer]

Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler?

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number settings enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed plus an extra $100 off all mattresses. And Saturday only at a sleep number store or sleepnumber.com.

[Kate Lister]

Was it a happy marriage? Like was it?

[Fiona Sampson]

No. Terrible marriage. So she marries a local country landowner, kind of hunting, shooting, fishing, which she thinks is fine because that's the masculinity she's used to. Her father's a military man. Her adored actually half brother who's older is military too. He's also an officer. He will die as a drunkard, but he's, you know. So they like good living. I imagine they're quite loud. So no, she's Brexit, that kind of thing. Probably. Yes. At the least. Yes, exactly. And Casimir Becomes a junk. And although I have to say, you know, she is pretty terrible to him in terms of. She's quite manipulative in those early years of marriage, in terms of, you know, oh, well, it's. So if you want me to be happy, you need to do X and Y. On the other hand, you know, they're married in 1822. By 1824, he's already, you know, hit her in public.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, no. Oh, that's. That.

[Fiona Sampson]

That will trigger really not good.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, dear.

[Fiona Sampson]

No, no. I mean, a real drunken brute, really, by the end. Okay, probably jolly when younger, but then, you know, he doesn't know what he's doing in life. He hasn't really got a purpose in life. His life doesn't turn out well, and his marriage doesn't turn out well, and he becomes, you know, he becomes the lowest common denominator. So you can see why she'd be desperate to leave. And she finds his will in 1830. And his will, she sort of thought, he's brutish, but he loves me, but the will is full of kind of contempt and this awful woman and I kind of disinheriting her and so on. And the time is quite convenient because it gives her sort of moral permission to say, well, the marriage is over. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Paris. I'm going to come back every three months. So I'm going to alternate three months, Paris, three months back home with my kids. Three months, Paris, three months back home with my kids. And again, that wouldn't have been quite so extraordinary in an era when the children had nursemaids and, you know, a tutor, all of that. You know, children weren't brought up by their parents in the same way. So she doesn't abandon the kids, but she does. She goes off to Paris. And at first she lives in a property that belongs to Hippolyte, but he realizes that she's carrying on with Sandon and won't have any part of it. So she moves in with Sandeau. And almost immediately, I mean, like in the first three months, she has literary success, which is the more extraordinary because she hasn't really been practicing it at home yet. It's very, very.

[Kate Lister]

What did she write? Did she write about my adventures with teenagers Under a Pear Tree by George Shands?

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, she does write love stories to begin with. I mean, she turns up, she's lucky. She's got an introduction to the editor of the Figaro, who is called Amelie de la Touche. And he Happens to be from La Chartre, also one of this community of intellectuals between Paris and La Charte, which, as I say, is so extraordinary, because La Charte, it's not like tours or, you know, some city, some provincial city. No, it's just a little market town. Anyway, a mutual friend sends an introduction and she turns up with a romantic manuscript, you know, a romance. And he reads it and says, well, it's a pile of nonsense, but your own speaking, writing voice is good. And he gives her a desk at the Figaro. He puts her on the staff.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, my God. What? Like what? Writers gone like that. Wouldn't we all like that? Yeah, that's gone to somewhere quite deep. On behalf of all writers that you could just hand over a manuscript. Well, it's rubbish, but here's a job.

[Fiona Sampson]

Exactly. But I think that he must have seen something in her that was literally. Because, you know, Figaro was his baby, and I don't think he would have risked it.

[Kate Lister]

Was that a big deal? The Figaro?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, it was already.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, that's like a magazine is.

[Fiona Sampson]

It wasn't a daily yet, but it. Well, it became a daily newspaper, but then. And kind of the Newspaper Record, but at that point, it's still a magazine. It's more like a literary magazine. Right, okay. But still. And also, I'm pretty sure that he was gay. So it wasn't that. There wasn't that ulterior motive. I think he's pretty admirable figure because later on, also, he gives her his apartment. When he retires, he goes to live. You know, a good guy in the drawer. Yeah, a really good guy. And, you know, almost, needless to say, not a heterosexual good guy.

[Kate Lister]

We almost had one. We almost had one.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, we almost had one, so. And at the same time, then he realizes that the lovers are short of money and a kind of commercial novelist has recently died. And he gives the couple this ghostwriting gig. Okay, so he's only taken on Aurora. She still is at Le Figaro, but he offers the couple a ghostwriting gig. If you can write this novel under the name of the deceased author. It's called the Commissionaire in four weeks. And they do.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Fiona Sampson]

I mean, probably Aurora does most of it, but, yeah, they do. And as a result of that, the publishers are so pleased with them that they say, okay, you can do one of your own. So again, Homie de la Touches intervenes and says, well, it's not perhaps fair that you're called Jules Sandeau, is it? Because. So the first one is obviously Ghost Writing. So it's pseudonymous. Why don't you call yourselves J? Sonde so J for Jules, but Sand, Not Sondo, but Sand. And again they deliver and it comes out just before Christmas and it does well commercially, but Au Raw has had to do most of the writing of it.

[Kate Lister]

When they talk about the invisible labour of women, this is what they mean.

[Fiona Sampson]

Absolutely. Yeah. It gets worse, as these things so often do. So Aurora's going backwards and forwards. So her next time back in Paris is Spring, is April 1832, and she comes back with a manuscript of her own, which is Indiana, which is going to be a huge success, will be a bestseller, will be, you know, revolutionize what the novel can do and so on. And. And it is. She comes back, but she comes back willy nilly. But there's a cholera epidemic in Paris. She comes back and she brings her three year old Solange, echoes of her mother with her.

[Kate Lister]

Oh dear. Okay.

[Fiona Sampson]

Did she not know there was a, you know, what was going on? Was she so ambitious that. Who knows? But anyway, she comes back and they do all survive. They don't get cholera, they survive. And Indiana comes out and is this huge literary sensation because it's well written and it has a kind of right from the beginning, she writes in the same way, she writes her letters in this very engaged way. It's clearly a woman's writing. She is not effusive, but powered by kind of emotion and emotional drive. She is really. There's a real authorial presence in the writing. And it's right from the beginning. It's writing that's about the condition of women. But it's never lecturing, it's always she. She allows the emotions and ideals to kind of inform what one should think. So the first novel is all about the misery of an arranged marriage versus in the end, happy love achieved by living in sin in Mauritius. Actually, as it happens.

[Kate Lister]

God, love to live in sin in Mauritius. Wouldn't you?

[Fiona Sampson]

Oh, well, exactly. And also really interesting is that Indiana has global majority heritage. Indiana is Creole.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Fiona Sampson]

Indiana is very progressive. Exactly. And she's the protagonist. It's from her viewpoint, she's more emotional, passionate. These things are seen as good as truth telling rather than as, oh, the mad woman in the attic.

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[Fiona Sampson]

You know the whole. Yes, that's the Rochester and then wide Sargasso seeing.

[Kate Lister]

They were quite racist colonial, those texts. Texts weren't. They don't know if people want to have that conversation just yet. But they were.

[Fiona Sampson]

Exactly, exactly. But Aurora manages not to be. She's Written this novel as G Sand to distinguish herself from the novel she

[Kate Lister]

wrote with where's the Dopey Boyfriend in all of this. This is just by her.

[Fiona Sampson]

Is it still hanging around? But then her second novel, which comes almost immediately, Valentine, she signs a contract, which nearly all the money, despite the fact actually she needs money because she's not getting allowance from her husband and so on, will go to buy him out of the draft. Oh, hello.

[Kate Lister]

Right, okay.

[Fiona Sampson]

And meanwhile, he's in the summer of 1832 while she's madly writing the next novel, novel number two, Valentine, which is, you know, the whole second album problem. But she does it and does it incredibly quickly and it's a great success. She's bought him out. She's given him, in a sense, all the proceeds. And he kind of is moaning to his friends and gradually he alienates their whole social group, which of course, is really his social group because it's all the blokes and, you know, can't be bothered to come and see her because they're both. They've both come back down to the south for the summer. Well, not all. All the way south, but, you know, down to Andre. And. Yeah, he just basically takes the money and runs.

[Kate Lister]

So he takes the money, whinges on and then everybody gets a little bit bored of him. Interesting. Okay, so her star is very much on the rise. I can't imagine that she puts up with a whingy, mopey boyfriend. Whinging on for too long.

[Fiona Sampson]

She doesn't. But she's gonna have form in that area. I mean, she really is. I don't know. I think, you know, one wants to say lots of things. Did she have terribly low self esteem, really, as a result of losing her babies? Who knows? You know, she really puts up with qu. A lot for someone who's such a. Has such a flamboyant external.

[Kate Lister]

We see this all the time. Like Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft was another one. Pioneering feminist. Had sex with the worst men ever.

[Fiona Sampson]

Absolutely. But in May, Imlay. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Wants to kill herself over. I know. So. Yes. So maybe it's a kind of shame, a kind of tall poppy syndrome. If you're a woman, you're doing really, really well. Some. Something. It's hugely interesting. Of course, this is another reason why these 19th century women are so interesting. Because we can kind of try and reconstruct the psyche, reconstruct what was really happening and ask those questions for ourselves, but without being coloured by, you know, the things that we don't realize we've internalized and that sort of thing. I mean, they kind of write it large for us, don't they? They do.

[Kate Lister]

I heard of a term being used amongst Gen Z and the term was hobosexual. And that's a man that moves in and just uses all your stuff and becomes a bit of a parasite.

[Fiona Sampson]

Oh my God, that's so good.

[Kate Lister]

Is that so good?

[Fiona Sampson]

I know.

[Kate Lister]

God bless Gen Z. Is that what we're dealing with here? A homosexual?

[Fiona Sampson]

I think he is, yes. I think he is. But here's where Henri de la Touche's last gift to Georges comes in. She cuts off by going to live with him. And although she still finds an apartment for Jules because poor little boy, he can't do it for himself and she calls him little Jules and so on, she does all that, that nevertheless she's no longer cohabiting.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, all right, so there's a divide there. Does she have other lovers at the same time?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, this is the start of her years of rebellion.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, I love it, I love it.

[Fiona Sampson]

Okay, so 1833 is her most prolific year, I think so. She has a one night stand with Prosper. Mary May, who will become famous for Carmen, is already famous as a travel writer. And she becomes a scandal of Paris because he tells a friend, oh, I had Mary Mae last night. And he was 5 foot 5 inches. And Alexandre Dumas sends us all around Paris, says, you know, the 5 inches is casting aspersions on his manhood.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, oh, no. Oh, I thought you meant height five foot five. Oh no.

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, yes, I mean, maybe she did, but I think the 5 foot was the height and the 5 inches was something else.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, okay, I'm with you.

[Fiona Sampson]

Which meant the Paris was then really, you know, keyed up to hate. Her third novel, and indeed did. Her third novel was Lelia. And that was regarded as really controversial because it basically said women are completely better off without marriage. And it was quite explicit about attacking the institutions itself. And she also lost her political allies, the sort of San Simonists, the people who thought they were totally progressive.

[Kate Lister]

That was too far. Was it? That was the line exactly.

[Fiona Sampson]

Equality, but not actually for women. The usual, you know, like the French Revolution itself.

[Kate Lister]

That's really interesting though because we're still having these conversations today right now because less and less women are wanting to get married and have children. And there's real discussion, heated debate around this. And here she is in 1830 saying exactly the same thing.

[Fiona Sampson]

Absolutely. Saying really it's a tyranny, you know, and living by it. I mean, you know, she is going from relationship to relationship with some overlaps and she is, she's having the courage to do that. And this is the 1830s, so 1833 is also when she has the only relationship we know that she had with a woman who was the leading female actor of her day called Marie d', Orval, who'd been a child prodigy and so on. Only for a few months, only for about three months or so. But they remain friends, which is really good. Maybe they remain friends and they were friends with benefits, who knows? But you know, it starts in tense and then it isn't. And it's Marie Dorval. She boasted to Marie Dorval about Mary Mae, about the one night stand. It's Marie d' Orval who sent that rumor all around Paris.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, blabbermouth. Right.

[Fiona Sampson]

Okay, so when Georges had another one night stand with a man while she was seeing Marie, she didn't tell Marie.

[Kate Lister]

I bet she didn't. What about Chopin? When does he make an appearance?

[Fiona Sampson]

We haven't got there yet. No, because now she has a relationship with the poet Alfred de Musset, who was then kind of, you know, like a rock star. Mad, bad and dangerous dinner. So they were like this premier couple. But he's young again. He's living with his mother.

[Kate Lister]

Well, she does have a type, doesn't she?

[Fiona Sampson]

He really has a type. Oh dear. And even they all look the same, you know. So she takes him to Venice where he gets typhoid and the doctor she calls in to treat him, Pietro Pagello, she has an affair with him. So demise goes back to Paris. But she and Demisse don't really split up. Well, they're on, off, on, off for two years till 1835. And then he's violent. Also a classic domestic abuse, you know, flit with the help of a friend and somewhere to go to and yeah, some money from an advance from her publisher. So that. So that's 1835. Then ages 36, she meets Chopin for the first time. She meets him through Franz Liszt, who's kind of Chopin's frenemy really, you know, friend, but also contemporary, but rival. I mean such both of them, these kind of celeb pianist composers. Liszt will long outlive Chopin, but very different in their personal style. One Chopin, very kind of, well, effete really and polish and delicate and will die of tb. Liszt very romantic, Byronic hair, you know, big pieces of music, big, you know, temperament, Hungarian, but you know, a Pole and a Hungarian who've come to Paris to make their careers in, you know, the center of culture. And Eliszt and his partner are friends of Georges, as she is by now, as she's friends with all sorts of people like the painter Delacroix, these other novelists we've been mentioning. She is, you know, really, really well known. She's at the center of European culture,

[Kate Lister]

in the epicenter of it.

[Fiona Sampson]

So she meets Chopin, but you know, he's with a much younger woman and nothing happens. But in 1838 she decides to set her cap at him in spring and by the July they're living together. They'll live together for nine years. Nine years during which she supports him so that he doesn't have to go on concert tours, which he doesn't like doing. And he can compose his masterpieces, which he does do, but you know, it's on her shilling. I mean, obviously he gets paid advances and so on for his work, but it's not enough.

[Kate Lister]

Hobosexual.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, but he is gay. I mean, almost certainly gay because now his letters are being retranslated and he writes really mucky letters to one friend from his youth in particular, you know, saying things like I had a dirty dream about you last night, you know, so please allow me to kiss you today. Or you know, I'm going to come and see you but make sure you're clean shaven.

[Kate Lister]

Oh well, really, Exactly.

[Fiona Sampson]

He's not just that kind of 19th century effusion and you know, friends shed dead because they did. No, no, it's. And right from the start, Georges is sort of. Because Chopin's best friend in Paris, who's older, who I think isn't a lover or if not a serious lover of his, but is called Wojciech Zimara, becomes Georges confidante while she's trying to get together with Chopin. And indeed while she's with Chopin. And she says to him, you know, he seems to disdain, in the manner of devouts human coarseness. And she thinks that, you know, he's so refined. And she also in the beginning thinks he's not yet split up from the young woman, though he has. So it takes her a year really to realize, okay, there's gonna be no sex here. During which time she has taken him to Mallorca, she's taken him south for his health because he's obviously already chesty, as it were. And then there's this famous stay in Mallorca where they stay on the island and then the last two months estate in an idyllic but very cold Cistercian ruined monastery, a charterhouse at Valdemossa, which is what everybody who knows about Georgetown knows about Georgetown. Oh, she took Chopin to the wet and cold of Mallorca, but she didn't. She took him for his health. Because Paris, of course, like London, is a low lying base and it's full of smogs and so on. Not as industrialized as London at that point, but still. And she's taken him south. And it's just their bad luck that it happens to be an exceptionally rainy, exceptionally cold winter. It's unusual they have that year, but you know, it's not her fault. Anyway, it takes him quite a long time to recover and when they get back to noon, after she sort of writes a note to herself, you know, that's the end of it. But she keeps him on because she thinks he's a genius.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Fiona and George after this short break.

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Why choose a Sleep number Smart bed

[Fiona Sampson]

Can I make my sight softer?

[Commercial Announcer]

Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler?

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed plus an extra $100 off all mattresses and Saturday only at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com cash flow crunch on Deck Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible, transparent pricing and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply [e-mail] funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes. Your business loan may be issued by On Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amount subject to lender approval.

[Kate Lister]

She kind of collects these little younger genius waifan stray types. That's very interesting. By this point she's going by George or Georges Sand.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes. So she's jsonde when she co writes with Joe and then she becomes G Sonde. But she's still being called Aurora domestically. But by 1832 she and that Georges is Georges, a French Georges with an S on the end. But by the time she gets together with De Musset. So this is 1833, she's dropped the S and she's got the English George. George Sonde.

[Kate Lister]

Okay, okay.

[Fiona Sampson]

And who knows why? Except the sonde is an abbreviation of Sondeau. And Georges, I guess is an abbreviation of Georges with an S. Or because the convent she went to was an English order. It was the English Augustine sisters. So maybe I don't know why she does it, but maybe she's also raising a flag. It's not quite a man's name.

[Kate Lister]

No. But she does do quite a lot of things in her personal appearance and in her life. That really, really shocking for the time today, probably wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow at all. But like she would wear trousers. She's going by a man's name. Could you talk to us a little bit about. About that? That?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, I'd love to. I mean, she starts wearing trousers when she's still a teenager at home in New Orleans. And she does it because she learns to ride. Not side saddle as a convention would be for a lady, but as she calls it in the English style. So whatever you call whatever the opposite of side saddle is cross saddle, I don't know what you call it. Not being a horsewoman. And she's taught by Hippolyte, her half brother. So. And she goes through these long gallops and there's a practicality about wearing boys clothes. And it really reminds me, we're talking about having thought about other women. It really reminds me of Elizabeth Browning, who, until she fell ill, was a tomboy and didn't want to be a girl because she hated the word feminine, because she thought it was everything to do with constriction and having to be weakling. And she wanted freedom and agency. And Georges does something really similar. She talks about being gassant. She's a boy. She likes the idea of the boy. Obviously she likes the idea of the boy sexually too, but she likes the idea. Boyhood seems to have to do with freedom. So we've already remarked that she's immensely heterosexual. I mean, she's extremely. There is no question. These are not allowances, convenience. She clearly really has a type that she falls for. But when she comes to Paris, and only in her private life, with for example, de Musset, she wears frocks, okay? She's frocked up, she's normal. And when she's living in nowhere and when for her whole sort of, from, you know, her 30s onwards, she wears frocks. But when she's young and making her reputation in Paris, she goes out and about and she wears a man's attire, right? Not only the trousers, but she wears, you know, she looks quite. She looks very Smart and, you know, tailored in contemporary images. But there are two things I think going on. One is there were young women who did do that, particularly who wore male riding coats which were for them fashionable, which were really big, long ones actually designed for century duty because they allowed you to go out and about in Paris and not get hassled. And, you know, you could go to places where women weren't supposed to go. Like you could go to the cheap seats in the Gods in the opera and so on, which women weren't allowed to do. You could go unescorted. Does that in fact, so much so that, you know, 20 years before she got to Paris, there was a Parisian bylaw enacted forbidding women to cross dress because it was regarded as becoming too much of the thing.

[Kate Lister]

There's lots of women actually doing this.

[Fiona Sampson]

There are lots of women actually. But she's a famous one. She's already successful, so what can we take her down for?

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Fiona Sampson]

But the other thing that is going on, I think that is, for me, really interesting. And you see it in the images of her. And one of the things I wanted to do, that's why, you know, it's called Becoming George the Book and the Invention of Georgetown. I wanted to see how this image became stark, this reputation, but also how she became who she became. And I'm really interested in how. I mean, it's one thing to swim against the tide and actually get to do your work, particularly the tide of the early 19th century, but it's another thing too. What does it look like to be authoritative if you're a woman? That is something we don't have images of. We have lots of images of incredibly gifted. Even today, we have lots of images of incredibly gifted young women. First novels, you know, debuts, debutantes, you know, and fantastic. That's an advance. But, you know, it's the whole debate, isn't it, about email. Newsreaders get cut off at the knees at sort of 50 or whatever. Whereas the men goes, we don't have an image of female authority, so what would female authority look like? And Georges answer seems to be. And you see it particularly in the late, great portraits. Well, you see it in Delacroix doing a portrait of her. And then you see it in the 1830s, and then you see it in the late, great photos by the great photographer Felix Nada of her, that she is dressed as a man but isn't pretending to be a man. Okay, okay, so she's not. It's not transvestism in that whole identity, sexual way. It's what does a woman like when she wears the costume of authority, looks like a man? What does a woman like when she's wearing the uniform of being a writer, which is a young woman, which is a boy's uniform. And what does she look like when she's wearing the uniform of being a master? Which of course, in the last more than a decade of her life, she became friendly with Flaubert, much younger novelist, whom she advocated and who calls her dear. Master. Master. The masculine form. They're using dear in the feminine form. So she's really. She's really queering stuff up, but it isn't about desire. And I think that's mega interesting because it's so relevant to everyone everywhere.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, I can understand obviously, you know, like queer history and trans history is so important, but you can also. It's like trying to unpick it. But you can also understand how somebody that like, maybe wasn't trans and, well, slightly queer, she seems to be, but they would actually resent being a woman just because that. That was so limiting in so many ways. And what they're trying to do is like adopt the freedom and the authority that was given very freely to men.

[Fiona Sampson]

Exactly, exactly. I don't think it's, in her case about essentialism. I think it's about the freedom and authority of men. And I think probably for straight CIS women, which she may or may not have been. Well, obviously she was cis. That is really interesting because I think it's quite important we don't only think about trans and queer history. Although those, as you say, those are incredibly important, incredibly important to recoup those particularly because by their nature, well, by the nature of society, they were buried for so long. But I think it's really important we keep talking about the construction of womanhood and the construction of femininity because that's about agency in a different way. Not only our responsibility as witnesses to the past, but our responsibility to. Well, as witnesses to a different constituency in the past. What does female authority look like?

[Kate Lister]

So what happens to Georges Sanden, this woman that's running around having affairs left, right and centre, collecting little waifs and strays quite into young men, numerous affairs, A huge colossal literary genius wearing trousers and smoking cigars. What happens to her?

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, she doesn't have a bad life by 19th century standards. That's to say, she doesn't die at 40 or anything. She lives on until 1876, which is pretty good going. So she's 72 when she dies of bowel cancer. Horrible death. But you know, but she. She publishes 70 novels, huge success with plays in the Paris equivalent of the West End. She writes travel books, she writes an autobiography in sort of 1854. She founds progressive newspapers. 3 she has pamphleteer in 1848 for progressive politics, advocates for clemency for people who've been imprisoned as a result. She defends the case of. Was a young woman with learning difficulties who was thrown out by the nuns in La Chartre in the convent and, you know, was discovered weeks later, obviously being, you know, abused, pregnant and, you know, just absolutely kind of disgusting. And Georges not only wrote about that, but raised money for her and so on. So there's a shift into ecological writing. She writes three really influential. And they won the school curriculum in France until quite recently, I think in some places they still are novels about the life of poor people in the countryside. So Devil's this is 1846-18. So coming up, 1848, Devil's Pool, La Petit Fidet and Francois Le Champi and La Petite for debt is so fundamental to the culture that that's the novel that Proust's mother is reading to him in a La Rechercher shape. And then the great loop back isn't just the Madeleine, but in the very. Towards the end of the very last volume, he discovers an edition in a friend's library and takes it down and that's the time regained. The telescoping isn't just the Madeleine, it's La Petite Fidet. And she's writing. So this is before Thomas Hardy, and she's writing about the lives of ordinary people, rural people. So she's moved her attention away from the lives of women to the lives of poor people in the countryside. So she writes about that with respect and understanding and not romanticizing. It's not pastoral, it's something very different. It's political in a different way. And then she also starts ecological writing. She writes these astonishing sets of essays talking about understanding that the natural world is an ecosystem, that it shouldn't use that word obviously yet, but you know, that it's connected to itself and sort of is independent of us, but that we can impact it, and we do impact it. So she has this kind of vision of the world as ecological, and she has had that all her life because when even she went as a child, she invented this kind of green man, Locust Day kind of deity who is sexless, genderless, who's called Corambe. So there's all of this work going on and she calms down, she's Something about the life with Chopin slows her down and all. She does have affairs, and then she has this really good relationship for 15 years. Towards the end of her life, he dies first because he has TB as well. She and her son Maurice, known for the Marshal, are settled in Nohan, where she builds a marionette stage for him, because he becomes a really distinguished marionettist and also lepidopterist and an illustrator. So he's very gifted. Of course, he can't become as famous as her, but he's also very protective of her. He's a really loyal son. He becomes a kind of keeper of the flame. She also builds a sort of incubator stage for trying out her plays, which then go and have success in the West End. So she settles and she becomes known as La Bonde Dame Nohant. So for her good works and the locality. So she becomes, you know, she settles into a kind of matronhood and, you know, it's gendered, it's feminine. She wears dresses, she's doing traditional things, taking herbal remedies around to cottages and so on. And she's universally held in terrific esteem as this kind of literary cultural monument. And the train line is built, so people come down from Paris a lot to visit. And she has the reward, at the very least, of the culture, understanding what a great writer she is. She has the reward of having a loving son who marries quite late. He doesn't marry till he's 39. He marries the daughter of a family friend, an artist, Kalamata. So in, he and Lina have a son who dies, but then two daughters who live. And the one of them, the younger one, auror, lives until 1961.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Fiona Sampson]

Lives on at Nohant, keeping it, as it were, as a museum. But Ant also manages to get the French state to take it on and turn it into a museum. So this kind of tremendous continuity of sand right down to 1961. And she's said to really resemble her grandmother, too. And so there's a. Almost in touching distance, but of course not.

[Kate Lister]

So as a final question, then, just to take it right back to what we were saying at the beginning, why do you think women like George sand aren't able to retain that fame in the way that great male writers are able to? Cause she's not the only one, but she's a really dramatic example of it. Why do you think that's the case?

[Fiona Sampson]

I think it's attritional work by male critics, I think almost. I don't know, because one can hardly bear it to be true. But I think that unconsciously, even the nicest literary men see themselves in the other with another man and they just don't take women seriously. Profoundly, profoundly still. And, you know, I. In a way, I don't know where to put that because it's so hard to sort of bear, in a way. But they still. I mean, we're still. We're still at the de Beauvoir stage that, you know, men are the norm and we are othered. I mean, it's just extraordinary. And although there's, you know, things are so much better than they were, at least in Britain, than they were, you know, a generation ago, as we've seen in North America. Slip back very quickly. Look at Afghanistan, and it's just profoundly still there. I mean, a personal anecdote. I'm not obviously pretending I'm George sand, but I am by now quite a serious biographer of major Romantic figures, not romantic figures who. Let's try and find something in their diaries and, you know, to try and say, oh, well, they could have been a writer if they. These are women who dared and did, you know, who had this huge achievement and against the grain of circumstances, like double the achievement of the men. And yet, you know, a couple of literary men I can think of who are, I would have thought, friends to whom each of them, because it happened, you know, I saw them, I gave an advanced copy of the book. Each of them is nattering on about other books they're going to read. It doesn't occur to them to read my book. And I do think, you know, when you look at the reception of. I'm sorry to say, but someone like Richard Holmes, who is a wonderful biographer, Romanticist and so on. But when you look at a female biographer, the kind of notion is that I'm just a transparent lens and, you know, somehow the story of George sand wrote itself. There was no research, there was no storytelling. There's no way that the material is organized. Oh, no, just somehow guileless Fiona, you know, and George sprung fully formed from the keyboard in the same way as to come back to Mary Shelley. This constant talk, even when people acknowledge she wrote the novel kind of, oh, well, what in her surroundings could have made her write it? You know, as if the fact that there was stuff in Popular Science and the fact that her partner was friends with Byron somehow then made Frankenstein spring from her pen. No, she did the work.

[Kate Lister]

She did it.

[Fiona Sampson]

She made it. And it's just. It's heartbreaking. It's very, very hard. I mean, it's very clear with some writers. You can see Elizabeth Back Browning. You can see the moment. The turning point is Harold Bloom. You can see the moment at which he's dismissing her and saying, unfortunately, she was an impediment in the life of, as he says, the greatest poet of her age, which was Robert Browning. And he says it's very ad feminine. Oh, she got in the way. She wanted to dress her child up as a girl. I mean, lies. But you know, attritionally, if that, that is a narrative over and over and over, these are the men. I mean, Oxford, you know, when I was still an undergraduate. Millshot is much better now. You could do Auden and Elliot. This is the most modern the curriculum became. Or you could do Tennyson and Browning. There was no question it would be Elizabeth Back Browning. And yeah, just systematically written out. I have to believe that our attritional, it's more nutritional in your case because you have great reach and so. But, you know, the attritional, keeping naming the names brings them back. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, at least counterbalances that.

[Kate Lister]

Fiona, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for coming to tell us about this incredible woman. If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Fiona Sampson]

I have a website and I'm in Wikipedia and I'm in who's who. So Google me.

[Kate Lister]

Google her. Thank you so much and oh, here,

[Fiona Sampson]

let me hold out the book.

[Kate Lister]

Here we go. Becoming George. It's a fabulous, fabulous read. Go and get it. Thank you so much. You've been marvel.

[Fiona Sampson]

Oh, thank you, Kate, for everything.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Fiona for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever is you get. Your podcasts coming up this month. I'm excited, excited to be heading to the golden age of Hollywood and all the scandal that came with it. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email [e-mail] this podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again Betwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by history hit. This podcast contains music from Epit Sound.

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Why choose a sleep number? Smart bed Can I make my sight softer?

[Commercial Announcer]

Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler?

[Sleep Number Advertiser]

Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your sleep number setting Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now, during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed, plus an extra $100 off all mattresses. And Saturday only at asleepnumberstore or sleepnumber.com

[Commercial Announcer]

your new home is now ready. Dr. Horton, America's Builder has new homes that are ready today. With new construction communities throughout the Puget Sound and Central Washington areas And more coming, Dr. Horton has the right home for you at Dr. Horton. We're still building, with more construction, more communities and more homes available every day. Tap your screen now or visit Dr. Horton.com to find your new home. Now ready Dr. Horton, America's builder An Equal Housing Opportunity Builder.