"What a brave man she was," said novelist Ivan Turgenev, "and what a
good woman." French writer and feminist Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin,
Baroness Dudevant, aka GEORGE SAND (1804-1876), smoked in public and
dressed like a man, carried on scandalous romantic affairs and was an
intimate of Chopin and Flaubert...and wrote some of the most intriguing
works of 19th-century French literature: novels, plays, autobiographies,
literary criticism, and political treatises. This three-volume 1886
collection of her correspondence sheds light on her personality,
morality, and ideas on religion, all of which molded the philosophies on
women's sexuality and women's freedom that she is famous for today, and
aids a deeper understanding of her work and her place in the history of
feminism. Volume I begins with a detailed biographical sketch and
features the letters of the eight-year-old Mademoiselle Aurore, the
young woman she was to become, and the mature artist we remember her as.
From her early literary endeavors to the secrets of her cultured society
and the friendships and work she was engaged in to her early notoriety
in the 1840s, which appears to have bothered her not one whit, this is a
fascinating look at the shaping of a woman who would shape Western
society at large.
