Rebecca Chou in The New York Times:
For nearly half of the 19th century, the French writer George Sand dominated literary Europe. She produced over 70 novels; 17,000 letters, some to the literati of her day; numerous essays and articles; and dozens of plays. She outshone Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in reviews. Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned sonnets about her. And Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent his adolescence blithely absorbing her prose. Modern times, somehow, chiefly remember her as the lover of Frédéric Chopin and as a connoisseur of suits, cigars and much younger men.
A rather mortifying legacy for the great Mme. Sand. It is this distortion that preoccupies the British poet and scholar Fiona Sampson in her new biography, “Becoming George,” which arrives for the 150th anniversary of Sand’s death. History has turned Sand into “all personality, little art,” she asserts, her notoriety “used to occlude her work, and so obscure her place in the literary canon.” To move past this “costume drama,” she urges us to see Sand chiefly as a writer, an inventor of stories and also of the self.
More here.
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