GEORGE SAND: A Biographical Portrait

by Ruth Jordan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 1976

A pleasant if unambitious life of a great personnage and heedlessly gifted artist who deserves to be remembered as something more than the trouser-wearing, insatiable mistress-mother of Musset and Chopin. Curtis Cate's 1975 biography opened up some possibilities of literary and intellectual revaluation. However, Jorden a (British journalist) opts for a straightforward narrative centering on George Sand's personal relationships--a chaotic and crowded terrain which she narrates with brisk clarity. She traces a pattern of insistent, questing, quasi-maternal attachments which thrived for the most part on anxiety and protectiveness rather than on physical passion as such. She sees George Sand as an exemplar of women's emancipation in the forcefulness and candor with which she recognized and pursued her sexual interests, not in any striking new definition of those interests. Equality in marriage struck the unamicably separated Mme. Dudevant as more to the point of the ""woman question"" than equality in politics. She emerges here as an unabashed egocentric with less to teach us from what she said than from what she was and did. Whatever the merits of this evaluation, it results in a cleanly but rather tamely told story.

Pub Date: July 26, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Taplinger

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION