George Sand

A scrupulously researched and tenderly revealing biography of one of the great pioneering figures of 19th-century French literature.

Born in 1804 — at a time when women were deprived of their civil rights (along with minors, criminals, and the insane) — Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin grew up to defy those norms, both in her life and her writing. Adopting the gender-neutral pen-name George Sand, and in a career lasting over forty years as a novelist and playwright, she is best remembered today for the affairs and friendships she enjoyed with men: the composer Chopin, the painter Delacroix, and the novelist Balzac.

But this moving biographical portrait, written by Séverine Vidal and illustrated by Kim Consigny, restores her to the centre-stage she always commanded in her lifetime. Not just as the daring, scandalously cross-dressing, bisexual, cigarette-smoking divorcée novelist, but as the brilliant chronicler of her changing time — and therefore of ours.