flâneur

George Sand

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There is something wonderfully excessive about George Sand's life and writing. I was astonished and delighted when I first discovered her in my teens. She seemed a fantastically vampish yet androgynous figure, and her sexuality struck me as peculiarly intriguing. I found portraits of her: drawings, engravings, and paintings. She is beautiful only in some, but her eyes are always beguiling, disproportionately large, almost black, and invariably mysterious. The photographs of her in later life are full of character: there is remarkable strength in her face, but also the suggestion that she has suffered. Then there are cartoons, quite as vicious as today's cartoons of media figures caught up in scandal. I wondered particularly about the hidden life of George Sand, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 and died in 1876. She is France's most famous nineteenth-century woman writer, but she is best known as the famous lover of the celebrated Chopin, and variously described not in relation to her

George Sand INTRODUCTION George Sand A Woman's Life Writ Large By BELINDA JACK Knopf Read the Review There is something wonderfully excessive about George Sand's life and writing. I was astonished and delighted when I first discovered her in my teens. She seemed a fantastically vampish yet androgynous figure, and her sexuality struck me as peculiarly intriguing. I found portraits of her: drawings, engravings, and paintings. She is beautiful only in some, but her eyes are always beguiling, disproportionately large, almost black, and invariably mysterious. The photographs of her in later life ar

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