BECOMING GEORGE

The latest biography of one of literature’s great mavericks.

Few of history’s iconoclasts shattered as many norms as George Sand. Born Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin de Francueil in Paris in 1804, the daughter of an aristocratic father and “a working-class Parisienne” mother who was once a chorus girl, Sand was raised from the age of 4 by her grandmother at the family manor in Nohant-Vic after her father died. She would go on to write 70 novels, a revolutionary enough achievement for a woman of that era. What made her a scandal were the many taboos she broke, including, as Sampson puts it, “Extramarital relationships, sex with a woman, infidelity within affairs, [and] initiating first separation and then divorce as a woman.” In this linear narrative, Sampson covers all of that material, from the childhood years in which her grandmother enrolled her in a convent to her ill-fated 1822 marriage to country landowner Casimir Dudevant to her celebrated novels and “notorious career as a sexual polymath.” The last included such paramours as Jules Sandeau, a 19-year-old law student; actress Marie Dorval; dramatist Alfred de Musset; and, most famously, Frédéric Chopin. Throughout, Sampson includes excerpts from some of the 17,000 letters Sand wrote during her “lifetime of prolific correspondence,” as well as passages from her autobiography The Story of My Life. Sampson has a coming-attractions style of writing that some might find grating. For example, she informs the reader multiple times that Sand had an affair with Chopin before finally describing it. And some of the prose is unintentionally funny, as when she writes of Auguste Clésinger, the sculptor who married Sand’s daughter, Solange, and whose specialty was “sexy marbles of writhing women, whose signature breasts were set usually akimbo.” But the book is still an entertaining introduction to an influential writer.

An admiring profile of a literary and feminist pioneer.