"NO LUXURY, YET SUCH RICHNESS (...)"

It was in Nohant, close to La Chatre, where George Sand was brought up and where, as an adult, she chose to spend the larger part of her life, arousing through her career and the originality of her lifestyle as much suspicion and disapproval as admiration and devotion. Her house is still intact, rich in mementos and artefacts, with some of the decorative features which she would have known, serving as a backdrop to her life as a woman and as a writer : the boudoir where, bent over her closet desk, she penned her first novels ; the drawing room full of portraits, the immense oval table made by the village joiner, where the family and so many friends, some famous, chatted, worked, played, read books aloud or created their first marionettes ; the office on the upper floor, close to the blue bedroom where she lived her final days ; the park and the vegetable garden which she loved to maintain and beautify ; and nearby, the small graveyard where her ancestors slept and where she is buried. A landscape of coppices, hedgerows and sunken paths, typical of the Boischaut Sud surrounding Nohant and La Chatre, which she baptised ‘The Black Valley’ : a few familiar communes where one should not look for geographical and historical unity - merely a region which was dear to her heart and to her daily routine, the subject of her tender affections and poetic dreams : “No luxury, yet such richness” ; no detail deserving particular attention, but an immense oneness where little by little serenity pervades you, a sense of repose entering the soul - La Vallée Noire [The Black Valley]
All those novels set in ‘Le Berry’ illustrate the instinctive bond which drew her to this region, and which offer us the landscapes she loved, enabling us in turn to perceive that poetic quality she had once recognised in them : It seemed to me that the Black Valley was indeed myself ; it was the mantle of my very existence [Valentine).

A woman in the Romantic movement

At the age of 28, publication of Indiana brought immediate fame, and George Sand rapidly came to fulfill an important role in the artistic life of her period, associating with writers, musicians and artists involved in the Romantic movement : Balzac, Delacroix, Liszt, Pauline Viardot, and later Dumas the Younger ; Flaubert and Turgenev were her friends, as also were illustrious actors such as Marie Dorval or Pierre Bocage ; she was in contact with Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier, Fromentin, the Goncourt brothers and in such an abundance of talent, so many others now neglected, but who at the time occupied a position in the world of the arts. And of course, everyone remembers that her life was shared by Musset and later Chopin. Even her somewhat hectic and emancipated love life was perfectly in tune with the impetuosity and effervescence of a generation in full evolution, as with the quest for liberty and the desire to give women and men the same rights, the same activities, sometimes taken to excess.

A woman of commitment

Her ability for reflection and commitment was precocious : as she later explained, it was upon listening to her private tutor Deschartres on the management of the Nohant estate that she began to reject the concept of ownership and consider the principles of community ; oppressed peasants and women appeared very early in her first novels ; the impact of Rousseau and the Age of Enlightenment was fundamental ; subsequently, Sand subscribed to 19th century political thinking and utopian socialism, notably through the influence of Pierre Leroux with whom she founded La Revue Indépendante (The Independent Review) (1841) and later La Revue Sociale (The Social Review) (1845). She also read Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc and many others, extracting ideas upon which she founded her own personal doctrine ; Tocqueville saluted her range of vision and her modernity of thought. She provided active support for the 1848 Revolution, but under the Second Empire showed more caution, welcoming the Republic but failing to understand the short-lived Paris Commune (1871). The feminist views she held were expressed above all in the recognition that women were equal to men in intelligence and ability, and in their right to education and personal liberty (freedom of marriage and divorce) ; on the other hand, it seemed to her impossible and premature that women could enter politics, because of the mentality of the period and the inadequacy of women’s education.

Literature in the service of this commitment

It was particularly through her novels that George Sand sought to communicate her message ; from the beginning, the majority of her writings conveyed her rejections or her hopes, and her ideas on the condition of women and that of the people. Any ‘classification’ would be simplistic, but in general the early novels (Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, André, Mauprat ...) embody reflections on her life as a woman : the good fortune and misfortune of marriage, the difficulties and the injustices of womankind, the dreams of love and the disillusions ; even as early as Valentine, André or Simon, she was already concerned by social inequalities and the condition of women peasant workers. The tales set in Venice developed a more romantic inspiration (Leone Leoni, l’Uscoque), but also introduced a new and vital concept : the vocation, life and destiny of artists, such as in La Dernière Aldini (The Last of the Aldinis), Les Maîtres Mosaïstes (The Mosaic Workers), - above all in the romantic, historical and musical canon, which is represented by Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (The Countess of Rudolstadt), an idea which would be followed through some years later in Adriani, Le Château des Désertes (The Castle in the Wilderness), L’Homme de Neige (The Snow Man), Les Maîtres Sonneurs (The Bagpipers),
... Around Nohant, Sand found inspiration for outstanding bucolic novels : even if they are not the first to be set in ‘Le Berry’, they are unique in focusing more and more closely on peasants who become true romantic heroes, in a poetic and appropriately rustic setting. The final novels, written approximately after 1860, are not well known, and many are no longer in print ; their subject tend to be sentimental and psychological analysis. But Sand did not abandon defence of her ideas : Mademoiselle La Quintinie is a true anticlerical and virulent pamphlet, while Mademoiselle Merquem defends the freedom of women and equality in marriage. This simplified study necessarily omits many other romantic or philosophical themes, and indeed other literary or stylistic features, so great is the wealth of Sandian inspiration.

A writer of the first rank

For George Sand must at last be recognised as a major author of the romantic movement, the equal of Hugo, Balzac or Dumas. Sand has herself admitted that she wrote without plot and without research, but in fact she paid particular attention to the quality of her writing, to the adequacy of her characters and the situations which she described, and her contemporaries always praised the fluidity and purity of her style. But it was above all in narrative outline that she made genuine advances. Not limiting herself to novels, she wrote short stories, tales, plays, essays (such as Letters of a Traveller) and memoirs (Histoire de Ma Vie - Story of My Life). Within the novel form itself, she expanded narrative concepts(‘classical’ novels in the third person, novels with several narrators, pseudo autobiographies, stories told through letters, dialogues...) and categories of novel (contemporary, historical, sentimental, social, and those touching on the fantastic or comic). She offers in fact a complete and fascinating panorama of fictional genres in the 19th century. Neither must we overlook the letter writer, journalist and pamphleteer : a reporter for the Figaro when it first appeared in 1831, she wrote mostly for the Revue des Deux Mondes (Two Worlds Revue), without neglecting other newspapers, such as L’éclaireur de l’Indre (the Indre Guide), having contributed to its foundation. The 1848 Revolution revealed her less known talent for polemics, notably through the character of Blaise Bonnin, a Black Valley peasant, who acted as her mouthpiece denouncing scandals and injustices. Finally, her total correspondence is estimated at some 30,000 letters, a portion of which Georges Lubin recovered and collated between 1964 and 1995, filling 26 large volumes - the 27th to be released : we will then have found the text or trace of nearly 22,000 letters. Moreover the importance and the quality of her work are now recognised, thanks to the many university research groups in France and abroad, which demonstrate their vitality and interest with international conferences and high level publications.

Text by Marielle Caors - Vandekerkhove
Translated by Ray Alston