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The first novel that George Sand wrote without a collaborator, this is not only a vivid romance, but also an impassioned plea for change in the inequitable French marriage laws of the time, and for a new view of women. It tells the story of a beautiful and innocent young woman, married at sixteen to a much older man. She falls in love with her handsome, frivolous neighbor, but discovers too late that his love is quite different from her own.

George Sand was looking out of her window at Nohant when she began the preface that became one of the most important statements of artistic purpose she ever made. She was watching a ploughman at work in a spring field — his oxen, his small son walking beside him, the patient rhythm of the furrow — and thinking about a Holbein engraving: the medieval ploughman guided through his labor by Death itself, the skeleton driving the furrow alongside the man, the image of peasant life as unrelenting toil haunted by mortality. The scene outside the window was not the scene in the engraving. And ...

The National Road is the first narrative history of the federal project—begun decades before the nation itself was born and ranging through the 1830s—that connected the United States across the Alleghenies and into the western frontier. Starting with a young Washington's dream of uniting the...

Lélia cannot love. Not because she has never tried — she has, with the totality that her nature demands — but because she has passed through the aspiration for the absolute and found, on the other side of it, only the permanent confirmation of its impossibility. She cannot be reached by Sténio, the young poet who loves her with a completeness that is destroying him. She cannot be consoled by Trenmor, the former gambler who has survived his own degradation and found in renunciation a stoic peace. She cannot be saved by Magnus, the fanatical priest whose religious obsession with her ...

A private secretary lives at the closest possible distance from another person's life: present at the intimate correspondence, trusted with the private arrangements, admitted to the rooms from which the world is generally excluded — and yet always, definitively, on the wrong side of the line that separates the confidant from the equal. George Sand knew that distance. She had spent her adult life navigating the space between the intellectual companionship she could form and the formal subordination that was the condition of every such companionship — between the freedom she could claim ...

"The Devil's Pool" (1846) is a novel about the life of the French peasants by George Sand. Excerpt: "I knew the young man and the beautiful child; I knew their history, for they had a history. Although but a peasant and a laborer, Germain had always been aware of his duties and affections. He had related them to me clearly and ingenuously, and I had listened with interest. After some time spent in watching him plow, it occurred to me that I might write his story, though that story were as simple, as straightforward, and unadorned as the furrow he was tracing."

A long-overdue reappraisal of the groundbreaking nineteenth-century writer who reshaped the literary and social norms of her age. By the age of thirty, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a Paris garret had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her novels...

Mariée, au sortir de l'adolescence, à un vieux colonel, antipathique et autoritaire, Indiana est contrainte à une routine d'outre-tombe. Tout la disposait pourtant à être sauvée par l'amour : Raymon, par qui elle se laisse séduire, possède la jeunesse et la fougue que n'a plus son mari...

A scandalous love. A suffocating marriage. A woman determined to feel alive. First published in 1832, Indiana is one of the earliest and most powerful novels of French Romanticism—and a bold, emotionally charged exploration of love, freedom, and the constraints placed on women. Set against the lush backdrop of colonial society and Parisian life, the novel follows Indiana Delmare, a young woman trapped in a cold, controlling marriage. When she encounters the charming and elusive Raymon de Ramière, she is drawn into a passionate and dangerous emotional awakening—one that forces her to ...

From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been...

I thought getting a linguistics degree would land me a decent job, not get me shipped off to an alien planet ruled by barbarian warlords with tails. But that’s exactly what happens when my own government kidnaps me, along with a bunch of other women, and drops us on a brutal desert planet in the name of research. But the mission goes wrong. Because of course it does. 

Horace Dumontet arrives in Paris from the provinces at nineteen, full of republican ideals and literary ambitions, with his sister's dowry financing his education and his parents' hopes financing his vanity. He is charming, confident, and almost entirely without discipline. He claims to despise bourgeois mediocrity. He gambles, borrows, spends, and performs the drama of his life in the manner of a man who has mistaken style for substance. His story is told by Théophile, a medical student who lives in the Latin Quarter with his mistress Eugénie and sees through Horace from their first ...

Juliette knows what Leone Leoni is. She has watched him gamble away fortunes that were not his to lose, charm his way out of consequences that would have destroyed anyone less beautiful, disappear without explanation and return without apology. She has no illusions about his fidelity, his honesty, or his capacity for the kind of love she deserves. She knows all of this with complete clarity. She loves him anyway. She cannot stop. Leone Leoni, published in 1835, is George Sand's deliberate answer to Manon Lescaut — the Abbé Prévost's great novel of a man destroyed by his love for an ...

She is a poor Spanish girl with a divine voice, an iron integrity, and no patience for the compromises the world demands of women. She will need all three. The Countess of Rudolstadt, first serialized in La Revue Indépendante between June 1843 and February 1844, is the magnificent continuation of Consuelo — and together the two volumes form one of the grandest, most original novels of the nineteenth century. Where Consuelo carried its heroine from the opera houses of Venice through the castles of Bohemia and the imperial court of Maria Theresa in Vienna, The Countess of Rudolstadt ...

Valentine de Raimbault has grown up in the château, in the world of inherited refinement and social certainty that her aristocratic birth has provided. Bénédict has grown up on the farm below, in a world of labor and land and a different kind of knowledge entirely. They are separated by everything the social order knows how to measure — and drawn together by everything it cannot. Valentine, published in 1832 within months of the triumphant debut of Indiana, is George Sand's first rendering of the Berry landscape she loved and understood more deeply than any other writer of her time —...

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes? 

Lucrezia Floriani has retired from the Italian stage at the height of her fame. She has loved, and had children by different fathers, and lived according to feeling rather than convention, and she is not apologetic about any of it. She has settled into a life centered on her children and on the genuine richness that her nature requires. She is, in any honest accounting, a woman of extraordinary moral seriousness — which is precisely what the moral vocabulary available to her time has no category for. Prince Karol arrives and loves her with an intensity she initially receives as the ...

Indiana is young, Creole-born, and married to a man she does not love — a retired colonel who exercises the authority that French law gives him over his wife with the matter-of-fact completeness of someone who has never thought to question it. Into her circumscribed life comes Raymon de Ramière: charming, ardent, entirely convincing in his devotion, and entirely unable, when it matters, to be what he has promised to be. George Sand's Indiana, published in 1832, was a sensation from its first appearance — praised by the leading critics of the day, read throughout France, and recognized ...

On l'appelait "la petite Fadette", car elle avait la taille d'un farfadet et les pouvoirs d'une fée. Comme sa grand-mère, elle guérissait les hommes et les animaux. Landry, l'un des jumeaux de la ferme voisine, tombe amoureux d'elle. Mais l'amour d'une sorcière est mal vu dans cette famille, et il rend malade de jalousie Sylvinet, l'autre "besson." Après "La mare au diable", et "François le Champi", c'est le troisième roman champêtre de George Sand. Elle y exprime tout ce que la vie lui a appris. L'apparence des êtres ne compte pas, il faut percer l'écorce.

Late in the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a boy cannot sleep. His mother comes to stay, and she reads to him. What she reads — in the lamplight, on the night that becomes for him one of the indestructible memories of childhood — is François le Champi. Decades later, seeing the same book in a library, the narrator is flooded by the return of everything that reading contained. Proust did not choose this book at random. He chose it because a story about a foundling who found belonging, read by a mother to a child who needed her presence, was the right vessel for the ...