The first translation of The Countess von Rudolstadt in more than a
century brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most
ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French
literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt,
born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an
opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout
Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a
quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as
an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression.
Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where
absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and
gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political
revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of
grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and
social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and
lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the
French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and
religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval--and aims to
channel their potential for future change.
Fed by Sand's rich imagination and bold aspirations for social reform,
The Countess von Rudolstadt is a sinuous novel of initiation,
continuing the coming of age tale of the titular heroine of Sand's
earlier Consuelo and drawing on such diverse models as Ann Radcliffe's
Gothic tales and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
