Volume 25, Number 13 · August 17, 1978
The Disconcerting Sybil
By V.S. Pritchett
Mauprat
by George Sand, with an introduction by Diane Johnson
Da Capo Press, 324 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Lélia
by George Sand, translated with an introduction by Maria Espinosa
Indiana University Press, 234 pp., $12.50
The Companion of the Tour of France
by George Sand, translated by Francis George Shaw
Howard Fertig, Inc., 396 pp., $17.50
The Haunted Pool
by George Sand, translated by Frank Hunter Potter
Shameless Hussy Press, unpaged pp., $2.95
The spell imposed by George Sand on European and Russian readers and critics in the nineteenth century is understandable; her people and landscapes are silhouettes seen in sheet lightning. For ourselves, what has been left is her notorious life story and the throbbing of her powerful temperament. Yet Balzac, Dostoevsky, and—of all people—Matthew Arnold admired her as a novelist. Proust admired her sinuous and gliding prose and Flaubert her exotic imagination. There she was pouring out ink in her sixty novels, her enormous autobiography, her works of travel, and her thousands of letters; a thinking bosom and one who overpowered her young lovers; all sybil, teacher, a Romantic, and, in the end, a respectable Victorian moralist.
Review, 3229 words
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