George Sand outsold Victor Hugo. Then we forgot about her. (Fiona Sampson)

Summary

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Broad History: "George Sand outsold Victor Hugo. Then we forgot about her."

Host: Isabelle Roughol
Guest: Fiona Sampson (biographer, poet, professor)
Date: March 5, 2026
Episode Theme: Reclaiming women’s place in history, through the life and legacy of George Sand—a best-selling but now largely forgotten 19th-century French novelist who outsold Victor Hugo and was a pioneer of female creativity, social critique, and personal reinvention.

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Overview

This episode explores the remarkable life, work, and legacy of George Sand, one of France’s most famous and paradoxically forgotten writers. Host Isabelle Roughol and guest Fiona Sampson (author of a new Sand biography, Becoming George) examine Sand’s outsized impact on her contemporaries, her subsequent erasure from the literary canon, and the complex intersections of gender, creativity, and societal expectation in her life. The discussion delves into Sand's unconventional upbringing, literary achievements, societal challenges, and continuing relevance—as an icon of gender transgression, immense productivity, and self-invention.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why We Forget Women Like George Sand

[00:37–05:33]

• Isabelle confesses not knowing any Sand novels, though Sand’s persona looms in pop culture as a scandalous, gender-defying 19th-century literary figure.
• Fiona Sampson identifies a core question: Why do women like Sand fall out of the canon, even as men of their era remain fixtures? She relates this to her larger project of restoring overlooked women writers (Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning) to their deserved place.

  “I'm really interested in the way women fall out of the canon, in the way that the men don't.” — Fiona Sampson [02:21]

• Discussion of the "scandalization" of creative women, the way women’s private reputations are foregrounded over their work, and the loss this represents to women's sense of their own creative lineage.

2. Sand’s Early Life: Inheritance, Illegitimacy, and Complex Family Ties

[05:33–12:31]

• Born Amantine Aurore Lucille Dupin de Francueil in 1804, Sand grew up at a societal crossroads in revolutionary France—with an aristocratic (but illegitimate) father and a working-class mother. Her early life represented a “fault line” between classes, legitimacy, and family expectations.

  “It's a kind of zigzag zip of illegitimacy that goes through the family tree.” — Fiona Sampson [06:10]

• Sand’s childhood was shaped by the competing influences of her mother (charming, impulsive, working-class) and her grandmother (strict, aristocratic, conditional in affection). This generational struggle shaped her lifelong self-invention and sense of divided loyalty.

3. Education & Self-Invention as a Young Woman

[12:31–19:12]

• Sand was educated in a Paris convent—“to be a good wife”, not with a classical, intellectual education like boys. Isabelle likens this to the “Bridgerton years.”
  • Sand describes girls in her era as “raised like saints, then handed over like fillies.” [15:24]
• Her reading was largely autodidactic, shaped by boredom, restrictions, and suggestions from local priests, leading to a direct, accessible style that differed from the florid prose of her contemporaries.

  “She doesn't write the kind of French that's formal and throat clearing... She writes something that's very immediate.” — Fiona Sampson [17:41]

• This accessible style made her especially appealing to the broad, rising class of literate women and middle-class readers.

4. The Launch of Her Literary Career & Adoption of a Male Pseudonym

[20:46–27:11]

• Sand did not seriously begin writing until almost 30, after years of marriage and restless creative experimentation.
• She co-wrote early works with her lover Jules Sandeau, placing fiction in journals and under the pseudonym “J. Sand.” Her breakthrough came with her solo debut, Indiana (1832), published under a masculine pen name.

  “She comes with a manuscript of what will be her incredibly successful debut novel, which is Indiana, which is the first novel she's written by herself.” — Fiona Sampson [24:17]

• Taking a male pseudonym (“George Sand”, later simplified to “George”) was a pragmatic move in a society where female authorship could ruin reputations.

5. Cross-Dressing, Gender, and Literary Persona

[27:11–32:37]

• Sand is famous as a gender-bending icon: she wore men’s clothes not as a grand identity statement, but for practicality, safety, and to escape restrictions on women.

  “She is very much wearing it as a costume… this is the costume of touch me not… it’s much safer.” — Fiona Sampson [28:23]

• French language and culture amplified these issues, with masculine vocabulary used to signal seriousness and authority—Sand was often addressed with male or ambiguous professional titles.
  • Flaubert, in later letters, refers to her as “cher maitre” (dear master, masculine) [31:09]
  • Alfred de Musset calls her “mon cher George” (my dear George, masculine) and “ma chère maîtresse” (my dear mistress, feminine) in the same greeting, showing a playful tension in gender coding.

6. Writing as Work: Prolific Output and the Realities of Women’s Lives

[32:37–34:58]

• Sand supported a household, children, lovers, and even legendary composer Chopin, largely on her writing—becoming a “workhorse” who published 70 novels, plays, autobiography, and travel writing.

  “By the time she's with Chopin... she's raising both children... looks after Chopin... and at night she writes novels. Well, when does she sleep?” — Fiona Sampson [33:20]

• Her first novels (Indiana, Valentine, Lélia) tackled the “tragedy” of arranged marriage and the lack of female autonomy—directly critiquing the social order and setting her apart in subject matter and tone.

7. Literary Legacy: Themes, Innovations, and Decline from the Canon

[34:58–39:35]

• Sand’s writing focused on individual women’s realities, systemic oppression, and social critique—sometimes dismissed as “just love stories,” but fundamentally political and radical.

  “It's a critique of society in exactly the same way as the men are critiquing their society... It’s the old sense of the male as the universal human condition and the female as... an exception.” — Fiona Sampson [35:19]

• She was a pioneer of rural realism and ecological awareness, and wrote with a distinctive, “immediate” voice.
• Sand was influential in her lifetime—her novels were widely translated and outsold Victor Hugo in England; she was a model for writers like the Brontë sisters.

8. Sand’s Legacy: Letters, Identity, and Enduring Relevance

[39:35–45:51]

• Sand’s legacy is partly preserved in her voluminous, literary letters, which show her as an inventor of self and a master of navigating (and subverting) gender and social expectations.

  “I'm fascinated... by how they invented themselves as writers... and had the courage to do it.” — Fiona Sampson [41:25]

• Later in life, Sand shifted between roles—Parisian literary star and the “good woman of Nohant,” a matron, a working writer, and a central figure in her community.
• While known in pop culture for her love affairs (notably with Chopin and de Musset), she was primarily a restless, creative force—her “queerness” more about pushing boundaries and exploring alternatives than strictly about sexual orientation.

  “I still think she remains a queer icon because I think it's queer in a sense of not really who you sleep with, but queering what being a woman is.” — Fiona Sampson [45:09]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the loss of women from history’s pages:
  • “It's tragic for us that we don't know our own canon, that we let these women be disappeared. Which makes it much easier to say, of course women can't do very much. Look, they never have.” — Fiona Sampson [04:28]
• On gender and self-presentation:
  • “She just wants to be a person without being limited by gender. And therefore sometimes she takes on the attributes of men because it's way more convenient to go around Paris in trousers, right?” — Isabelle Roughol [27:37]
  • “It’s a way of saying, this is a writer’s costume. I’m a writer.” — Fiona Sampson [28:47]
• On Sand’s legacy and being a queer icon:
  • “She in a sense says to us over and over, well, whatever the cage of convention you happen to be in right now. No, think around it, reinvent it, see what you can do with it, see how you can play with it, see what you might change.” — Fiona Sampson [45:09]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|---------| | 00:37–05:33 | Why George Sand faded from the canon; the "scandal" of creative women | | 06:10–12:31 | Childhood: Legitimacy, family conflict, and self-invention | | 12:31–19:12 | Education: Convent, self-taught learning, and writing style | | 20:46–25:24 | Marriage, moving to Paris, the start of her career, and pseudonym | | 27:11–32:37 | Male pseudonyms, cross-dressing, and gender presentation in literary Paris | | 32:37–34:58 | Her work ethic, supporting her household, and recurring themes | | 34:58–39:35 | Politics, rural settings, ecological writing, and literary impact | | 39:35–45:51 | Letters, self-invention, legacy, and her status as a queer and feminist icon |

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Conclusion

In this episode, Sand emerges not only as a literary giant whose popularity rivaled—and even surpassed—her male peers, but as an innovator, a champion of women’s autonomy, a working writer who built her own career, and a “queer” icon in the broadest sense—modeling how to break free of conventions and continually reinvent oneself. The episode echoes the ongoing importance of remembering women’s history as it actually happened—not just as a footnote to men’s stories.

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To learn more:

• Read Becoming George by Fiona Sampson
• Explore Sand’s letters and novels for her voice and radical views
• For further discussion & supporting Broad History, visit broadhistory.com

Transcript

[Isabel Hugo]

Hey, it's Isabel.

There is still time to support this tiny little show on the British Podcast Awards. Listener's Choice awards. Go to britishpodcastawards.com voting enter broad history and make sure to confirm your vote via the email you'll receive.

[Fiona Sampson]

I know it's crazy.

[Isabel Hugo]

This is a tiny show, but you are legion and you are powerful and you can make this happen. Voting closes on the 23rd of July, so do not delay. You only have a few more days to vote. It would mean the world to me. Thank you. Britishpodcastawards.com voting.

Hello, and welcome to Broad History. I'm Isabelle Hugo. To my shame, my double shame, as a French woman, I could not until this week have named a single novel by Georges Sand. I knew of her, of course, because she's famous, but not so much because of her work, which hasn't stayed in the canon, I have to say, the way that her contemporaries have, that would be Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal a little bit earlier, Zola a little bit later. So if you're a reader of French

[Fiona Sampson]

lit, that will sort of situate you.

[Isabel Hugo]

And I read all of these men in school, never George sand, and we'll certainly talk about why that is. But no, I know of her because of her personality. George sand sort of looms over the 19th century as this larger than life character, early queer icon, a gender bending woman in men's clothes to French people, sort of the female Oscar Wilde. And then I read Becoming George, which is the biography, the new biography of Georgetown by my guest this week, Fiona Sampson. And I have to admit that I found her to be both a really, really interesting woman, but not nearly the scandalous or unusual character that I think pop culture had made her out to be in my mind. So we're going to break all that down. And also through her talk about gender expectations, creative careers and the lives of women in the 19th century with Fiona Sampson. Fiona, hello.

[Fiona Sampson]

Hello, Isabel. Thank you for inviting me. This is going to be great.

[Isabel Hugo]

My great pleasure.

[Fiona Sampson]

And so I should say that you're

[Isabel Hugo]

a biographer of George sand, but also of Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

[Isabelle Rogol]

as well as a professor and a

[Isabel Hugo]

renowned British poet as well, in your own right. So when did you encounter George Sand? Why disinterest in this woman who, as I say, has somewhat fallen out of the canon?

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, I think two things, really. One is that I'm really interested in the way women fall out of the canon, in the way that the men don't. And the other is that in my first life, I was a musician. I was a violinist. And so if you're a musician, you know about. Obviously you know about Chopin, and if you know about Chopin, you know, there was this kind of strange figure who has a man's name, but it's a woman, but she seems to have been bad for him, but at the same time, she was part of his life for a long time. There is this sense of a kind of musty glamour around George sand. And as you kindly said, I've already written. Really, it's a trilogy. I've written about Mary Shelley and I've written a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And Barrett Browning and George Chand seem to me to share having been ticked out of the canon, although they were still in the canon when I was a kid. I mean, there was certainly even in an English public library. George sand was on the bookshelves when I was in school, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was in the poetry anthologies. But in the decades since, their reputation has superseded their work enormously. Particular things around Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a TV schlock series and play. And it had many iterations. A show on Broadway called the Barretts of Wimpole street, which is all about Elizabeth Barrett Browning as not a great writer with a sense of vocation and destiny, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the girlfriend of Robert Browning and as. And then wife and as kind of a hindrance to him and a kind of inversion of actual literary history, where, in fact, she was the literary pioneer, she was his senior and so on. And Mary Shelley, although Frankenstein, has enormously now taken up cultural space, and that's wonderful to see. Very much of that cultural space is around The James Whale 1931 movie with Boris Karloff being the shuffling monster. And less of it is actually, this was written by a teenage woman, and she wrote this fabulous novel, which is a kind of hybrid myth, and again, perhaps the opposite, really, that when I was, say, a student, the idea was that Mary Shelley hadn't really written Frankenstein. Hey, maybe she had a great idea, but really, Percy Bysshe worked it up into a literary work. And that, of course, is not the case. It's also not the case with Georges sand that there was no work, there was only a scandalous private life. And I think this kind of being subject to scandal is something that really, women still now, women stars now celebrities, actors, they're not any more novelists are still subject to. But I think all of us, women in our working lives are more subject to personal reputation than our male peers. And I Think that it's tragic for us that we don't know our own canon, that we let these women be disappeared. Which makes it much easier to say, of course women can't do very much. Look, they never have. On the contrary, even denied education, even denied the fabulous education that privileged 19th century white men had, women managed it. They managed to write masterpieces. They managed to be highly productive, well, even while they're having babies and goodness knows what. So in fact, I wanted to kind of invert the story with which we tend to live.

[Isabel Hugo]

Wonderful. That's music to my ear, because that's exactly the. The point of the Broad History Project is to remind people women have done all these things in the past, we just haven't kept track of them as we have of the men who have. Let's start with her childhood, the world that she's born into. She went by many names and her first one, her birth name, is going to be a mouthful for the non French speakers. My apologies, Amantine Aurore Lucille du Pin de Francai. I don't get to use my French that often on this podcast. Can you tell me about sort of her and the world that she's born into that Aurore du Pin is born into in 1804, I believe.

[Fiona Sampson]

That's right, July 1st. We're not quite sure. 1804, as you will know, and most Anglophone listeners won't know or will have forgotten, of course, it's revolutionary France. This is a France where there is. Everything is, as it were called by a new name. This is the France of the revolutionary calendar, of the department suddenly being introduced of a kind of partial deconstruction of the old aristocratic, I want to say fiefdoms, although I'm saying that metaphorically, divisions of the country and ruling class. And Aurora herself sits right on that kind of the fault line because, although not in an unusual way historically, because her mother is a former call girl, a Parisian working class girl who was on the streets by the time she was 14 and whose father and stepfather were both birdcatchers. And Auror's father was an aristocratic cavalry officer whose mother was the illegitimate daughter of the great Marshal of France, Maurice de Saxe, and he himself was the illegitimate son of the King of Poland, I mean, not quite then King of Poland when he was conceived. So it's a kind of zigzag zip of illegitimacy that goes through the family tree. But because Rohr was lucky enough that her parents quickly married, a month before she was born, they conferred on her legitimacy, which had huge practical consequences. But it meant that particularly in her childhood when for reasons I'm sure we'll come to, she moved between care by her paternal family and her mother's care. There's a kind of fracturing of her identity, a sense of she didn't quite belong to either class and it is still classic or set of economic prospects. And her identity is very contested, it's fluid. And you have this sense when she's writing, particularly in her autobiography in Histoire de ma vie, about her childhood, of a kind of anxious child who's trying to do it right with both kind of sets of families, both kind of family stories, trying to belong to both sets of codes and perhaps finding that very difficult. A kind of quite intense sense of self invention going on even from early childhood. And she had an illegitimate older half sibling on either side. Her father had had Hippolyte and her mother had had Caroline. So she has an older half sister illegitimate and older half brother illegitimate.

[Isabel Hugo]

It's, I'm sorry to say, a bit of a cliche of France. But there is just so, so many mistresses, even her very posh grandmother who keeps her to these very high society expectations of, of how a woman should behave, is herself a little bit on the edge in terms of her own identity and perhaps is all the more attached to defending that, that you know, gentry behavior. A girl raised in a convent, we'll, and we'll get to that. Raised educated in a convent like proper girls of her society, while also being a country tomboy who runs around, plays with horses and plays in the woods and, and has a quite idyllic childhood. Let's talk about Nohant, the house, her grandmother's house that she grows up in.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes. So Nohant is a beautiful late 18th century house. It's not huge, it's very much a manor house rather than a mansion. It's right on the village square, I mean right abutting it. It's sort of overlooked by the country neighbors, which is something, you know, Aurora remarks on and she talks about how in her childhood she, she was speaking dialect and she's running around and getting dirty and her mother is allowing this because it's, I think it. To get back at her mother in law, to get back at Marie Aurora de Saxe, to resist the gentrification while at the same time aspiring to it, while at the same time having made this advantageous marriage, having managed to produce an heir who as it were, luckily for Laura. So Aurora had a younger brother who died in infancy when she was just four. So Sophie Victoire, Parisian street girl, has arrived at Nohan as the wife of the heir to Nohant, having produced the next heir. And then very quickly, the little boy dies, the grandmother wants to take custody of Aurore, and Sophie Victoire's nose is put out of joint. And so I think, as people do when they're defensive, she sort of. She pushes back by embracing sort of vulgarity in a way. And really, even in adulthood, the adult Georget struggles with her loyalty to her mother, who she describes as musical, charming, irrational, can't concentrate, spontaneous, but very moody. And her grandmother, who is not moody, who encourages her to learn, encourages her in lots of skills, encourages her manners, but whose affection is a sort of. Is conditional as a reward. And it's clear that almost in adulthood, still in late adulthood, because the autobiography is not written until the 1850s, George sand is still struggling with who, when she was a little girl, she should have been loyal to and who she should have identified with. Because the women who are both strong characters very much set it up as a. You know, you have to choose which way you'll go. You have to choose which version of the family you're part of, which is tough for a child. It's a kind of company battle between two women, in a way.

[Isabel Hugo]

And I think that's something that is really shines through in your book. You've got really four generations because you've got the grandmother, the mother, you've got George and then her own daughter later, and you just have these incredibly complex mother daughter relationships and incredibly complex people who want and don't want the same things all at once throughout their entire lives. And yeah, it's just still so preciously rare to see such complex female characters in history and to be able to unearth all of that complexity of personality that is not that often recorded.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, thank you, Isabella. Because, I mean, every time I work on someone, I obviously sort of fall in love with them in a way, and I become more and more obsessed. And you go down all these rabbit holes and I think one of the. It's not a rabbit hole, I think is actually a huge space for exploration is Georges. Let's call her Georges and boycott. You know that she, like Elizabeth Batt Browning, she recalls that when she was young, she wanted to be a boy, not a girl. She wanted those freedoms, you know, she learns to horseback ride and she rides bareback and not side saddle as young ladies were meant to, but in the English style, as she calls it, her Playmate is. Is for a long time her older half brother, Hippolyte. So there's a kind of boyish formation. And also when Aurore's father dies, he falls thrown by his horse and dies in a tragic accident just when they've got to Nohant. So when Aurore is just four at that point, her grandmother, in her grief, sometimes calls Aurore my son. She says she very much resembles. Or when he was a boy. And she. There was clearly a sort of palimpsest relationship going on there in a way that obviously there wasn't with Hippolyte, even though Hippolyte came first and even though Hippolyte is also a boy, so there's all of that. And then in early adulthood, when Georges is laden with responsibility, she talks about no longer being a garcon, no longer being free to be a boy and to just go off to literary suppers or to sit around smoking and talking about books. She has to look after her children, she has to look after her household, she has to look after, eventually, Chopin and so on. So obviously, the figure of the boy is a figure of freedom and identification for her, in a way.

[Isabel Hugo]

And funny enough, she reminds her grandmother of her son. She looks like her father. Later on, it's her own son who looks a lot like her and takes a lot after her, more so than her daughter. So again, you see these generational patterns. But let's talk about what it means to be in as she's growing up, what it means to be a girl, what it means to be a young woman. We're in the. For people who want a pop culture reference. We're in the Bridgerton years. I'm just thinking about it because it's on TV right now. It's not where you go for historical accuracy, but one thing that is really quite accurate, actually, is the position of young women and young girls and just how clueless they are made to be about the world. So Georges gets an education in an English convent. So she ends up with a. With passable English. It's an English school in Paris. But the way girls are educated, they're educated to be good wives, essentially, right? They're not getting a very intellectual classical education the way boys are. And they're not educated either in the ways of the world. She has this wonderful sentence, we raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies. Talk about an indictment of what the early 19th century does to girls.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, absolutely. And it takes her a long time to sort of learn that, because, I mean, that Wonderful sentence. I mean, terrible sentence, comes from a letter to Hippolyte, when they're both adults, when Hippolyte's own daughter's about to get married, sort of warning him, you know, try and give her some warning, try and give her some breathing room and so on. So that's the adult speaking, isn't it? But when she's in the convent, she. She's very quickly. First of all, she's a devil, she's a wild girl. But very quickly she learns to fit in and she becomes immensely popular, and lessons which come very easy to her, and quite soon she's writing plays and putting them on. And she's allowed to do this because there's quite a community. There isn't just pupils and teaching sisters. There are also the classical, in the classical sense, women who have been sent to the convent to live or who've retired to the convent. So there is an adult community too. So it's a sort of mixed community. And she puts on entertainment for them, she stages Moliere. And she also has a crush on. She has a spiritual confessor for the first time, but she also has a crush on the assistant to the Mother Superior, who is a half English woman, Mother, as she calls it. She's not mother, actually, because she's not the Mother Superior. Spearing and Sister Spearing inspires to such an extent that Aurore thinks she has a vocation. You know, she's popular, not lonely. Her life is rich and varied, and of course, it's not the program at all. The program is that she's supposed to acquire manners and a ladylike finish and then go home to Nohant. So after only two and a little bit years, when she's 15, her grandmother comes up to Paris and whips her off, back to no one to be her companion. And then both restricts her life still further, but at the same time mocks the pietism and the little learning that aura acquired in the convent, and in fact is herself more educated than her granddaughter, and challenges her in discussions and so on. And Aurora, eventually, through sheer boredom, begins to educate herself, begins to read Rousseau, begins to read Leibniz, begins to read Thomas, a Kempe Imitation of Christ, finds that kind of emphasis on self perfection even more isolating, depressing, so begins to read Chateaubriand, the Genius of Christianity, and suddenly sees Christianity as a way forward. It's about art and religion and public and collective, and everything she was doing at the convent, and so in a sense has her own very private autodidacticism. But it's very piecemeal. It's very happenstance and piecemeal. She only reads Chateaubriand because her local confessor suggests it and because Chateaubriand is immensely popular and influential. Just at that point, she's very failed by her education, I think, for contemporary readers. The result is she's very readable. She doesn't write the kind of French that's formal and throat clearing and ornate, and she doesn't write the French of 19th century novels. She writes something that's very immediate. She doesn't have a particularly vast vocabulary, extremely accessible and quite informal and a very fast read, as indeed, she was obviously a fast writer. So there are. There are benefits from her lack of education, but it is very much a girl's education.

[Isabel Hugo]

And that's something you see a lot, I think, in the 19th century. You see women writing for a growing female readership. Like there's a lot of female writers and a lot of female readers and also men. But the common men, the ordinary men, they're excluded out of higher education and also therefore out of maybe slightly more pretentious or elite or academic kind of writing.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, absolutely. I mean, one thing is that it makes me think of again of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and how readable Frankenstein is compared to Mary Shelley's own later novels, when she sees herself as more of a literary figure and actually compared to Percy Bysshe's little, you know, interventions of change. Your description here, he always changes her prose into something stuffier. So there definitely is that. I think that one of the ways in which George Sand's timing was very lucky when she's georgetand is that she is becoming a writer. The time that literacy is increasing, there are more and more church schools, but there was also, you know, compulsory education is gradually coming in, so that there's the rise of a new literate middle class, you know, the bankers and shopkeepers and well, before the end of her life, there is universal, as it were, literacy. And with that is a great rise in the number of kind of professional outlets, the number of periodicals she can write for, the number of editors. There's a whole expansion of a kind of working, as it were, commercial, literary and writing world in Paris, as also in London. But obviously the timing is different because their states are so different. And I think that means that, yeah, reading becomes a more. Reading percolates down, reading for leisure percolates down many more layers of society. So a common touch, as it were, is suddenly a door opener to readers and reputation, rather than the opposite and

[Isabel Hugo]

so that takes us to her adult life. The start of her professional career, her adolescence, really her youth or her childhood ends with the death of her grandmother, who she takes care of. She gets married almost instantly. And that's really the expected, you know, married at 18, she's a mother at 19. She really starts out like any young woman of her age. When does that take a turn? When does she start to become the woman that we're. When does she start really writing as a profession?

[Fiona Sampson]

She starts writing really quite late. There are eight years of marriage before she really tries her luck as a writer. And during that time, for much of the time she's just restless and gradually unpicking her marriage by infidelity. And the marriage is failing in all sorts of ways. So she's doing a lot of rather unsatisfactory provincial living. And then in 1831, she has an affair with a law student called Jules Sandeau. He's a student in Paris, but he's back in La Chartre, her local town for the summer, which is how they meet. And conveniently, at the end of that summer, she discovers that her husband, Casimir Dudevant, has framed his will, but he's framed it in terms of such fury and contempt for her that she understands it's not that he's just clumsy, but really he loves her and she's the problem. No, actually he detests her. And that kind of gives her the emotional license to follow Sandeau to Paris. And she sets down the terms of. She frames it all as being her husband's fault, which is another form of female self erasure, but we won't go there. And she sets up an erasure where she'll spend three months. Three months. Three months in Paris. Three months back in no. 1 with her children. Three months in Paris, three months back in no. 1 with HER children. And she goes to Paris. And during the months before, she has been playing at writing. She's been trying to turn a travel journal into a book. She can't quite do it yet, she hasn't got the skills and so on, but she's very clever at discovering what she needs, which is a framework. And almost immediately when she gets to Paris, two things happen. One, she and Jules have been playing at co writing short stories. And they place a couple of stories in magazines. The odds with it, she herself goes to see the editor of the Figaro, Henri de la Touche, who turns out also to be from La Chartre. And so she has an introduction from home. I mean, an extraordinary piece of luck. And they obviously get on. He obviously sees something in her because he immediately puts her on the staff, which I mean you wouldn't do if you were the editor of the Figaro and you were going to sully your reputation by just taking on some young woman from home. You wouldn't do that. You might try and offer to publish some of her fiction, but you wouldn't take her on. But he does. He takes her on. So she has a desk at the Figaro and also realizes that nevertheless she's still very short of money. And so he offers her and Sandeau the chance to do some ghost writing, to ghost write a novel called the Commissionaire very quickly, in four weeks, which had already been commissioned, but the author died. And they do it. And one suspects that Au raw she still does most of it, but they do it and the publishers are pleased enough that they then pitch a novel that they themselves co write called Ros Blanche. And that too is published within this is all in 1831. That too is published before the end of the year. And most of that has actually been written by Auror. And this is published under the pseudonym of J. So it's not yet. It's no longer sonde to kind of equalize it up a little bit. And again at the suggestion of Henri de la Touche. So it all happens within a year, this commercial writing. And then in April 32, when she comes back to Paris after her next three months at home, she comes back not only with her three year old daughter, bizarrely because it's also into the middle of a cholera epidemic, but she comes with a manuscript of what will be her incredibly successful debut novel, which is Indiana, which is the first novel she's written by herself. So it happened really quickly, but it does happen through contacts.

[Isabel Hugo]

Yeah. So Jules Sandeau, obviously his legacy is to have eventually given her the name, as you say, when they co write it's JSON. And it over the time changes, she changes it to Georges Sand. Georges with an S, that French spelling. And I've always wondered how does she come to the English spelling of Georges? Where does that come from?

[Fiona Sampson]

Well, that just, that just she lapses from Georges. So she's G, just G on the title page of Indiana. And she is Georges. She's still being called Aurore by people in her own life and including Paris friends. But she gradually, in 1832, when she comes back to Paris that autumn, after next trip home to noon, she doesn't move back in with Sandeau. And she is Georges at this point but during the coming months, while she's living on her own in a new apartment, she gradually drops the S. She rehearses dropping it and I wonder if it's partly because it's the English name and she went to the English school, whether it's partly because sand is anyway an abbreviation of Sandeau and George is an abbreviation of Georges. And obviously I wonder whether there is, I mean, it's not literal cross dressing, in other words, sort of nominal cross dressing. It's a male nom de plume, but there's give even within that. And why does she have a male nom de plume? I mean that's, you know, know. Not mysterious at all, is it? This is the era this when she will be succeeded by George Eliot. But I mean it's the era of the Bronte sisters being, you know, the Bell brothers and so on. It's not. Mary Shelley is anonymous, Jane Austen is anonymous. She's a lady. I mean, admitting her gender, but not, you know, women publishing under their own name is still so problematic that I don't think that we can read anything into the fact she has a approximately male nom de plume. But nevertheless she does and she has an English one.

[Isabel Hugo]

So first she co writes Witherman, which helps her get published, and she adopts a male nom de plume, which as you say, incredibly common. It was just being seen as a writing woman was quite damaging to one's reputation. Probably didn't sell books as well either. So again, very practical. And this is also the time as she works as a reporter at Le Figaro in a very male world. Some of the comments she makes me laugh because I started my career at le Figaro about 200 years after her.

[Fiona Sampson]

That's true.

[Isabel Hugo]

And I recognize so much of it. It's a very masculine environment, even in early 21st century it was. But so there she starts dressing as a man and it seems to be not really some grand statement about her own gender identity or wanting to be a man. You know, certainly shouldn't put modern ideas of trans identity or anything like that on top of that. It is practical. It is being a woman at that time is a bit of a cage and stops what you can do and who you can be. And she just wants to be a person without being limited by gender. And therefore sometimes she takes on the attributes of men because it's way more convenient to go around Paris in trousers, right?

[Fiona Sampson]

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that she is very much wearing it as a costume. I think she is saying, I'm not going to Pretend I'm not going to hope that I pass as a man Although possibly on a rainy night with my hat well down. She is more saying, this is the costume of touch me not oddly, given that we think of her as someone who was promiscuous as she was.

[Isabel Hugo]

It's safer. It's much safer.

[Fiona Sampson]

Safer. And it's also more authoritative. You know, she has this lovely quote about bringing up the figure and saying, if you can make yourself indispensable in an editorial office, it's the best thing, because it's not. It has nothing to do with your personality, you know, ellipsis and your gender. It's a way of saying, this is a writer's costume. I'm a writer.

[Isabel Hugo]

Ok?

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, I admit it. I've got curls. Okay, I admit it. I'm wearing a corset, but I'm a boy, and I'm playing the role of a boy, a bit like a leading boy in a pantomime, an English pantomime. It's not sexual play because, interestingly, in her private life, she wears frocks. In her private life, when she's dating all these men, she's frocked up. She's not wearing. She's not wearing men's clothes for the bedroom at all. She's wearing clothes precisely, really, for the outside world. And also, of course, passing in the sense that it's hard places where she can't. Where women can't really go, like the gallery at the opera and so on. In men's clothes, she can pass enough that whereas if she were wearing a colored frock, obviously, she'd stand out a mile. So, not that I think that people look at her like a Shakespearean heroine and, you know, which gender is she? I think it's that she. Yeah, she's just saying, take me as seriously as you take yourself.

[Isabel Hugo]

Yeah. And it's. It's fascinating. I think that's something that's also very much sort of embedded in the French language, which is a gendered language. Right. It's got. It's got the feminine and masculine nouns are feminine or masculine. When people are trying to, you know, even give her compliments, you know, male writer, you're talking about her as this great man. Or there's something about the French language that even if there exists a feminine version of a particular word like author, like, it is less than. And to use, you know, I mean, we. We even do it in English. You know, some. Some actresses go by actor because actor sounds more serious. And even today in France, you know, People will debate whether the word ministre, the word for minister, government minister, should be feminized or not. And.

[Fiona Sampson]

And it's fascinating.

[Isabel Hugo]

Words become feminized when they become lesser status, essentially. It's just. It's a fascinating trait of language. And so again and again, even her friends and her male friends in the arts call her by male names as a.

[Fiona Sampson]

Exactly. And most famously, Flaubert, towards the end of her, you know, in the last decade of her life, calls her dear master, not mistress, but dear with the feminine form, which is the word that you use. Yes.

[Isabel Hugo]

Maitre is the word that you use today still to address a barrister. And we do not feminize it. Female barristers are called matre, not mistress. So master. It's. It's fascinating, you know, in a sense, a lot of the gender expectations that are embedded in French culture and therefore in French society, which are hard to convey in translation, but I think was an important point to make.

[Fiona Sampson]

And that's so interesting because I think that it makes it even clearer that she's very early trying to rock that linguistic and conceptual boat, isn't she? Obviously, when Flaubert says maitre, he's talking about an artistic master. And I suspect there were no female barristers in those days, so all barristers were maitre. So when she is dear female form cher, then something really is rocking in the language. And it's the same with her lover, Alfred de Musset, the poet. He addresses her. Oh, my. Now, let me get it right. Oh, my George. And my is maun.

[Isabel Hugo]

No.

[Fiona Sampson]

Okay, so it's masculine ma. And then he says, my dear mistress mache. So he says she's both maug and ma in the same sort of information, the same greetings. Yeah.

[Isabel Hugo]

The way that she presents her gender identity, I think has more to do with the limitations of the world around her and the language that she has to use than anything to do with her own identity, which she seems quite secure in. So you mentioned her first novel, and success comes quite quickly. And you also mentioned she's incredibly productive. I mean, the pace at which she writes is insane. I think partly because she needs to earn right. She has children. Her husband is. Or ex husband is not very helpful.

[Fiona Sampson]

She.

[Isabel Hugo]

I think Jules Sandeau is the first. But she attaches herself again and again to younger men and takes on a caretaker role and ends up looking after their careers, their finances. There's a lot of people who are reliant on her.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yeah, yeah. She is a workhorse. By the time she's with Chopin and for the years that she supports him, the nine years she supports him, for much of that time, she's raising both children and she's also acting as tutor to those children. So during the day she runs a household, looks after Chopin and tutors her kids. And then at night she writes novels. Well, when does she sleep? She sleeps for sort of four hours. And friends and peers talk her about her as being a sort of writing machine. The Gong hall brothers, for example, talk about her as being like that. And sure enough, she's quite a. Relatively, by the standards of her day, she's quite a late starter. And yet by the end of her life, there'll be 70 novels, there will be many successful stage plays, there will be criticism, there'll be autobiography, there will be travel writing. I mean, she's astonishingly prolific. Indiana is followed very quickly by Valentine and then the next year by Lelia. And all three of them are about the condition of women under particularly arranged marriage. And that arranged marriage is not just, ho, ho, ho, what a drag, but is actually an absolute tragedy for women. They have no autonomy, but also prevents them coming into selfhood of any kind. And they get progressively dark as those three first novels do. So while Indiana is a terrific success because it's driven by emotion and the argument, but it's reasonably melodramatic. By the time she gets to Lelia, she's really arguing against institution of marriage per se. And that makes her popular neither with traditionalists nor with radicals like Saint Simonists, who want to change other things, but aren't particularly worried about the state of women.

[Isabel Hugo]

Yeah, let's talk about her writing, since, as we've pointed out, we need to talk about her writing and not just her relationships, to put her back in the canon. What kind of literature does she write and how does that compare to what's going on in the time? I think we think of 19th century, you've got the Romantics, and then you've got the very political sort of Hugo Zola criticism of society. Where does she fit?

[Fiona Sampson]

Where she differs from Hugo on Zola and Balzac, his human comedy, is that it's not that all her protagonists are female, but they are centrally female, and that she tends to be up close on a paradigmatically difficult situation, rather than kind of big Canva crowd scenes. So she will look at how a marriage inevitably falls apart when effectively the husband owns a wife, and the writing, which tends to be quite emotional and quite urgent and fast and as a strategy of celerity, as Helen Sisu will Long time in the future, say there's a passionate argumentation from ideals about equality and the importance of women in their lives. But that's often misheard as, oh, this is just a story about private lives, or this is just a love story or a failed love story. But of course it's not. It's a critique of society in exactly the same way as the men are critiquing their society. And I think one of the tragedies of subsequent reception of Sonde, or at least 21st century reception, is a sense of, oh, well, yeah, but those novels don't read to us as political now because we don't live like that now. Number one, there is arranged marriage in many parts of the world. So, yes, we do. But also number two, but nobody says that about Les Miserables or whatever. Oh, we don't need to read that now because that was Paris in the 19th century. Society's different now. It's the old sense of the male as the universal human condition and the female as not only diminished, but as an exception, a special case of minority interest. And so I think the kind of progressive politics of her writing is often forgotten, but it's a motor. And I think she had the courage to not just write from sentiment like Oon, to be like these people, fell in love, but to write from ideals. So convictions which are held, but which she allows to be held within the emotions as well as within argumentation. And obviously, for a storyteller, that's a significant gift. I think the other thing. Two things she does which are very pioneering, is that she. She writes about the lives of the rural poor. And again, this is decades before Thomas Hardy will in English. And she writes about those lives as being full of dignity and meaning, but nevertheless not sentimentally pastoral. And, oh, you know, Hesiod. Oh, well, they're so wise. Different kind. No, she's showing the life is pretty awful, but she's also saying that people themselves are not pretty awful. They're understandable, they're human relatable. So she is, according a real dignity to another group who have still not achieved equality after the revolution, you know, after the various iterations of empire and so on. And the third thing she does is that she has this kind of ecological understanding. So when she writes about the natural world, she understands it as interconnected and that we affect it and affects us, but that it is independent of us. And that's ecology. And that's not just countryside settings or rural settings or nature writing. That's something much more than that. That's actually ecology. So I think in all three ways, she's very significant. And then, of course, she's just very significant because she is enlivening. She's part of this great miraculous 19th century flowering of the realist novel. And she's doing it with her own particular diction. And so in all those ways, she's creating a certain fluency and immediacy. We were talking about this in a way earlier, weren't we, in the texture of what you get to read. And she's a huge role model as well, because although she writes under a pen name, everybody knows she's that woman over there, even if they no longer know that she's actually Aurora Dudevant by marriage. And she's very important to the other women writers, but presumably, as you also say, to women readers, you know, so the Bronte sister, for example, they definitely model themselves on. They read her with fascination and they model her. You know, Wuthering Heights is quite a George sand kind of novel.

[Isabel Hugo]

So her success travels in her lifetime. She's read in translation.

[Fiona Sampson]

She's more widely read in translation in this country than you go. While they're both alive.

[Isabelle Rogol]

Wow.

[Fiona Sampson]

She knows everyone, you know, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Matt Browning, Ruskin in this country. But Liszt as well as Chopin, Delacroix, all the writers of her era, they all speak to her about her behind her back, as well as to her face as a literary figure of the utmost seriousness and importance. They don't dismiss her, interestingly, there's a sense that she's definitely part of their contemporary pantheon and should remain there. And I think they would be astonished that she has vanished to the extent that she has.

[Isabel Hugo]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when she dies, Victor Hugo, he's one of those men who uses that great men image because such as great woman, I guess, hasn't entered the vocabulary. Then she has this lovely friendship with Flaubert at the end of her life in epistolary, she writes a huge number of letters and writes them quite literary. Right? She writes letters the way that one might write books. Of course, it's a thing that is done in the 19th century. People are much better letter writers than we are.

[Fiona Sampson]

But it's still astonishing, isn't it? Because, again, that's another part of her productivity. I mean, there are thousands of surviving letters. She just obviously was the graffer made. She never stopped. It's just extraordinary.

[Isabel Hugo]

One thing I think you see in her letters as well, and I think that's something that is a bit of a theme throughout your book, is this idea of the creation of identity. Right. You're telling us she's telling a story about herself to the friend who's reading her, to us reading her later on. She's kind of always inventing and reinventing her own identity and her own personality.

[Fiona Sampson]

Yes, and I am fascinated by that. I'm fascinated with all these women, with these three women, by how they invented themselves as writers. That's to say, how they swam against the tide of social expectation right at the outset of their lives and then continue to do so. I mean, how did they have. Not only how did they acquire the accomplishment to do what they did, but how did they have the courage to do it? But I'm also very interested in how people become in general. I am quite a believer in subjects and process. I think people shape themselves and are shaped by life and not only in an early life psychoanalytic way. And I think that these women, figures like George sand, who travel such an enormous distance from where she started the process of self invention is really apparent, it's apparent in the life story and the achievement. But it's also, I think apparent in again that layering that palimpsest sense around her final or her later iterations of who she is when she stops having to be in Paris, to be a success and she's able even for stage, what we call West End, to have a lot of success on the Paris stage. She can still write those plays and have them rehearsed in noon. And she doesn't need to be in Paris all the time. So she goes back and settles mainly in Nohan, which she's owned all her life, of course, since she's inherited at 17. But she makes it a sort of literary centre, a center of productivity. But she isn't a saloniere. She becomes the good woman of Nohant. She becomes very generous, does good works to poor people in the neighborhood and so on, and becomes very practical in running the home farm and having a well appointed kitchen and so on. So she becomes this other iteration, this matron in a way, but at the same time she's also the master. And I think that's just extraordinarily interesting that these things coexist, that there isn't this kind of essentialist polarization. There is a simultaneity, but it's not chaotic. She has produced a mixture which works for her. She has found a way and she

[Isabel Hugo]

invents herself as well as we all do through the relationships that she embarks on. And I think it's fascinating that we're coming to the end of our hour and. And we've barely talked about them, even though that's what she is so perhaps most known for today, at least in the pop culture. And I think that proves our point from the beginning, which is she is so much more than that. But I will just mention them and then people can read the book because otherwise that's a whole hour, another hour of our conversations. But obviously the most famous one, as you mentioned, was Chopin, who is actually a fairly short relationship in the traditional sort of romantic and sexual understanding of the word, but then remains a presence in her life and she in his really for quite a long time. And you have Alfred de Musset before the young poet, the probably more famous of her of the many young, younger men that, that she has known, and Marie d', Orval, who is the only woman I think that she's known to have had a relationship with. So again we have this image of this sort of bisexual, gender bending queer icon. There is a quite short maybe relationship we're not even 100% sure with a

[Fiona Sampson]

woman in her youth.

[Isabel Hugo]

Absolutely.

[Fiona Sampson]

We're not absolutely sure. But I think one has to argue quite hard to try and dissolve that relationship. But there is absolutely no evidence of any other women. And definitely she has very much a sexual romantic type and it is the younger man, it is the gustle again. But I still think she remains a queer icon because I think it's queer in a sense of not really who you sleep with, but queering what being a woman is. I think that's where possibly the richness of her as a figure for us now is most significant. That she in a sense says to us over and over, well, whatever the convention of the cage of convention you happen to be in right now. No, think around it, reinvent it, see what you can do with it, see how you can play with it, see what you might change. And to me that's very rich, that sort of elective queering.

[Isabel Hugo]

Yeah, it does feel like if she had had another hundred years, there would have been another 10 versions of her. We would have known her by other names and other, other associations and other interests. Fiona, thank you so much. It's been really, really interesting conversation. I had no idea when I started reading into Georgeson, who I again barely knew, that there would be just so much there to learn and to be inspired by. So thank you so very much.

[Fiona Sampson]

Ah, thank you so much, Isabel. It was a joy talking.

[Isabelle Rogol]

That was Fiona Sampson. The book Becoming George is available at the Broad History Bookstore, which supports this program. You'll find links in the show notes [e-mail] there's also a slightly longer, uncut version of our conversation over on the YouTube channel, so you can see our faces as well, if that's your thing. The handle is Rodhistory. You can become a member or make a one time donation to make Broad History possible. This work, covering women's history with all the depth and nuance that it requires, backing good science with good storytelling. This requires constant research, reading, and making. It's a lot of work and it simply could not happen without supporting members. A big thank you to our first founding members, Michael, Ron, Alexandra, Hannah, and Caroline. You can join them at broadhistory.com, sign up for the newsletter, read the articles, and become a member. I'm your host, Isabelle Rogol, and this was Broad History. I'll talk to you soon.