George Sand, by Elizabeth Harlan

A working woman? What a scandal

George Sand was one of the most scandalous writers of the 19th century, as well as being one of the most prolific, and the most popular. Scandal came less from her many love affairs, her addiction to smoking, her donning male costume in order to walk unmolested on the Parisian boulevards, and her support for socialist politics, than from her decision to enter the public sphere. Women from aristocratic backgrounds were not supposed to dirty their hands with work. Married, with two young children, Sand left her family behind in the Berry, in central France, to move to Paris, find a job as a journalist, write novels, and earn her living independently as a writer. In her own day she was both admired and reviled, as she is in ours too.

George Sand was one of the most scandalous writers of the 19th century, as well as being one of the most prolific, and the most popular. Scandal came less from her many love affairs, her addiction to smoking, her donning male costume in order to walk unmolested on the Parisian boulevards, and her support for socialist politics, than from her decision to enter the public sphere. Women from aristocratic backgrounds were not supposed to dirty their hands with work. Married, with two young children, Sand left her family behind in the Berry, in central France, to move to Paris, find a job as a journalist, write novels, and earn her living independently as a writer. In her own day she was both admired and reviled, as she is in ours too.

Sand has fallen victim to the fate often meted out to women writers: the life being poked and prodded while the books go unread. At the same time the books are made to yield up the secrets of the poor little woman's search for love. George Sand did possess a brilliant imagination, as her many novels attest, but her literary reputation has suffered because she was overtaken by the kind of realism pioneered by Flaubert (her close friend) and then Maupassant. Sand, as an idealistic heir of the Romantics, searched for truth and beauty, employed a flowing, often poetic style, harnessed fantasy and philosophical dialogues to her ends. She is often hailed solely as the author of charming novels set in the countryside around her home at Nohant. People forget she also wrote about science, incest, slavery and marital cruelty. She wrote for her contemporaries rather than for posterity and was modest to the point of self-deprecation. Oh, she said to Flaubert of one new book: just my little annual novel. Flaubert lived in retirement, propped by a private income. Sand bustled about in the world, got involved in politics, travelled, climbed mountains. She undeniably bene- fited from having a nice little chateau to live in. The chateau being filled with her children, grandchildren and dependants, she worked to support them.

Biographers continue the battle to interpret this rich life. Belinda Jack, for example, in her magisterial biography of Sand published by Chatto in 1999, sympathetically traces Sand's ambivalence towards her daughter Solange back to her abandonment by her own mother, who came from an unmoneyed background and had worked as a prostitute. Sand was effectively sold to her grandmother, who brought her up. Belinda Jack, composing a subtle story of separation, loss, and reparation through art, nonetheless tries also to understand Sand's novels on their own, complex terms. Literature offers no simple mirror of life, since written language slithers unstably about, inflected by the joyfully anarchic unconscious. Elizabeth Harlan, on the other hand, enters the lists determined to nail Sand on what turn out to be moral grounds.

Her thesis is two-fold. First, she wants to reveal quite how abominably Sand treated Solange, rejecting and despising her and even driving her into genteel prostitution (Solange became a well-known courtesan). Second, she suggests that Sand's dreadful behaviour towards her daughter was connected to her discovery that she herself was illegitimate and probably not the daughter of her aristocratic father at all. Her mother, Sophie-Victoire, Harlan asserts, did not give up her promiscuous ways even when mistress of the wellborn man who was willing to marry her, and must have conceived Sand by someone else while her intended was away. Her evidence depends on a re-reading of certain family letters to which Sand had access. Her interpretation seems to me to come from our contemporary fascination with humanist, do-gooding therapy and counselling, whose models of growth narratives structure many modern novels. In this corrupted, vulgar version of psychoanalysis, Sand, tied on to the couch, her novels read as transcripts of her true thoughts, becomes a "bad" client who has not sufficiently worked through her unconscious conflicts and takes them out on her daughter instead. Sand, reduced to nothing but neurosis, produces confessional texts used in evidence against her in court.

I find myself wishing to gallop to Sand's rescue as though she were indeed a fallen woman in need of rehabilitation. Instead I would point to Belinda Jack's conclusion that Sand's sense of unstable identity, which powers many of her plots, connects not simply to whose penis entered her mother but also to questions of class, background, family and money, as well as to the political upheavals of the time. Similarly, Sand was certainly contradictory about feminism, but it's more helpful to explore these contradictions, if we wish to understand her, than to condemn her for harbouring them, as Harlan does. Art and politics do not always mesh easily. Women do not always become explicit feminists, even though it is obviously wise and sensible to do so. Most aristocrats of Sand's time were not hands-on parents (Harlan does not criticise the fathers involved). And so on. Biographies will come and go, and we critics and biographers will die, but Sand will continue to speak to readers who want to listen.

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