Volume 48, Number 7 · April 26, 2001
Liberated Women
By David Coward
George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large
Belinda Jack
Knopf, 395 pp., $30.00
The Life of Marie d'Agoult, Alias Daniel Stern
Phyllis Stock-Morton
Johns Hopkins University Press, 283 pp., $42.50
Marie d'Agoult: The Rebel Countess
Richard Bolster
Yale University Press, 278 pp., $25.00
George Sand (1804–1876) and Marie d'Agoult (1805–1876) have been for a century and a half objects of curiosity more for their colorful lives than for their writings. Rebellious spirits, they were thorns in an age which preferred women to be roses or, better still, lilies. They were born into well-to-do families and made, by contemporary standards, good marriages, but before they were thirty, they had turned their backs on respectability. Sand made a point of smoking cigars, cigarettes, and a hookah, wore men's clothes, had a sexually adventurous life of which she made no secret, and wrote novels containing thoughts and images that were seen as shocking, not suitable for reading by the young and innocent. Marie d'Agoult caused a scandal in 1835 by eloping with Franz Liszt and bore him three children (one of whom, Cosima, married Richard Wagner and became his muse). But neither Sand nor d'Agoult was content with notoriety. During writing careers that spanned forty years, both advocated extending the freedoms they claimed for themselves to all of the citizens, male and female, of the liberal, democratic republic they hoped would one day be established in France.
Review, 4855 words
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