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
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They were almost exact contemporaries and followed parallel trajectories. In the 1830s, they lived out the ideas of Romanticism more completely than the poets and novelists who have always overshadowed them. Victor Hugo lived like a bourgeois, Balzac worried constantly about money, Musset escaped into self-indulgence
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Moncler vendita, their liberal opinions acquired a harder intellectual and political edge and, through revolutions and upheavals, both kept up their attack on the conservative establishment through their novels, journalism, and essays.
Their latest biographers make no great claims for their literary achievements. Richard Bolster judges Marie’s fiction to be unsubtle and Phyllis Stock-Morton regrets that she did not give up writing novels after her first feeble attempts. Belinda Jack draws on Sand’s books not to recommend their aesthetic merits but as evidence of her reactions to events and insights into her attitudes. If Art, as Yeats said, is what we make out of the quarrel we have with ourselves, then both Sand and Marie had a lesser argument, addressed to others and to society. Marie lacked the imaginative ability to transmute the wrongs done to her into literary form and Sand never broke free of the sentimentality, preachy idealism
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