Amantine Aurora Lucile Dupin de Francueil was the real name of the writer George Sand. She is known as an author who can write an incredible amount (about 40,000 letters). People close to her said that she could write infinitely long and unusually easily. She often criticized the society of then-France. Because it broke social norms, it provoked various reactions. While Nietzsche called her a “fertile writer’s cow,” words of praise came from the pens of great writers such as Balzac, Flaubert, Heinrich Heine, and Dostoevsky.
The writer and critic of the Aurora Society was born on July 1, 1804, in Paris. She came from a family of Saxon elective princes and a Polish king, but from their illegitimate descendants. Her father was a commander in Napoleon’s army, and her mother a seamstress from a bohemian-working class family. After her father’s death, her mother did not take care of her. She was raised by her grandmother according to strict etiquette rules, and at the age of 13 she was sent to a convent for schooling. After her grandmother’s death, she inherited large estates and a hotel in Paris.
Against her mother’s will, she married a poor lieutenant, Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate son of a baron, and had two children with him. Due to numerous scandals, the marriage failed in 1836. In 1831, she began writing for the influential daily newspaper Le Figaro. There she collaborated with her lover Jules Sandeau. That is when their novel Rose et Blanche was written. They wrote under the pseudonym J. Sand, from which the male stage name George Sand was derived. Indiana signed her first solo novel under a new pseudonym. Then she started using grammatical forms for the masculine gender when she talked about herself and started wearing men’s clothes. After the novel Lélia (1833) she became famous outside France. She was the highest paid writer of her time. That year began a passionate love affair with Alfred de Musset, but after he fell ill, George Sand fell in love with his doctor Pietro Pagell.
Famous artists often came to her home: writers Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, painter Eugène Delacroix, composer Franz Liszt… This is how she met and was in a relationship with Frédéric Chopin. Since her son was suffering from rheumatic disease and Frédéric from tuberculosis, George decided to move with her family to Mallorca. The islanders did not want to accept such an unusual family, so they returned to Paris after three months. She then wrote a travelogue Winter in Mallorca. They broke up in 1847 for unexplained reasons.
George Sand wrote more and more frequently in articles and articles on social problems in France, and in 1841 she founded the Independent Review with Pierre Leroux. In it she published the monumental novel Consuela / La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-1844) in which she described a utopian society without sex and class discrimination.
When the revolution broke out in 1848, she took over the editorial board of the official gazette of the new government. Alexandre Manceau, a copper engraver, became a new life companion. She spent 15 years with them. She was a very caring grandmother and wrote fairy tales to her grandchildren. She spent the last ten years of her life in close friendship with the writer Gustave Flaubert. She died on her estate in Nohant at the age of 72.
