Showing results by author "George Sand" in All Categories

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sylvestre is fifty years old, a philosopher, and, he believes, a reasonable man. He has made himself penniless by one marriage and is traveling through the Swiss Valais toward a fresh start in Italy when he stops at the farm of Jean Morgeron and meets Jean's half-sister Félicie — a proud, intelligent woman of thirty who has been ostracized by her community for a single transgression committed in youth. He also meets Tonino, a young man of ambiguous status who seems, to Sylvestre's increasingly uneasy eye, to stand in some charged relation to Félicie. Sylvestre falls in love. Against his...

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 ...

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 ...

Venice, sixteenth century. Sébastien Zuccato — painter, teacher of the young Titian, a man of considerable local standing — has a problem: his sons Francesco and Valerio have abandoned painting for mosaic work. They are becoming the finest mosaicists in Venice, covering the interior of the Basilica of San Marco with work that will outlast everything painted on canvas. Their father considers this a disgrace. Sébastien asks Tintoretto — Jacopo Robusti, the most formidable painter in Venice after Titian — to help him talk his sons out of it. Tintoretto declines. What follows is one ...

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 —...

Bernard Mauprat, raised amidst lawless brigands, knows little of the world beyond his tumultuous upbringing until a fateful encounter at the age of 17 changes everything. When his cousin Edmee is taken hostage in their castle, Bernard risks everything to help her escape. Relocating to live with his uncle, he is finally offered the chance at an education—and his heart becomes entwined with Edmee’s, despite her hesitance due to his rough past. As he grapples with the shadows of his upbringing, can the nurturing environment of his new home redeem him? Will he find the strength to confront his...

"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."

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...

Dans les années où éclosent, en Europe, les forces qui renverseront l'Ancien Régime, à Venise, une jeune femme, Consuelo, fille d'une pauvre chanteuse bohémienne, apporte au théâtre, avec sa voix exceptionnelle, son génie. Roman historique, roman d'amour, roman musical, composé sans plan, au fil de la plume, chaque mois, pour paraître en feuilleton, en 1842, dans la Revue indépendante que George Sand venait de fonder avec le socialiste Pierre Leroux et Louis Viardot, "Consuelo" est aussi l'œuvre où l'auteur exprime le plus librement, et fortement, sa conception de l'histoire.

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.

This is one of George Sand's late great rural novels, dealing with life among the provincial poor, where customs were already changing when she wrote it.

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin was born on the 1st July, 1804, in Paris, France, to an unconventional family who were from different classes—her father being from noble lineage whilst her mother from rather more modest origins. Her writing, a blend of romance and realism, had an effortless spontaneity which neither sacrificed style or form and tackled the complexities of politics, society, and gender.

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 ...

A delightful anthology of great works by some of Europe's greatest short story writers....

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 ...