George Sand’s Life in Full Leaves Her Literary Art Buried

‘Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand’By Fiona SampsonW. W. Norton, 400 pagesBorn into an aristocratic family in 1804, Aurore Dupin quickly turned to writing. She spurned the demands of marriage to an abusive husband, dressed in men’s clothing and collaborated with a male writer whom she soon surpassed, and by thirty was an international sensation, the greatest and most prolific writer in the Romantic tradition.The poet Philip Larkin once joked that the tremendously productive Anthony Burgess was writing the whole of English literature at the moment. The same could be said of Sand in French, only more so, as novel after novel almost every year became a success, not to mention her forays into autobiography, playwriting, political polemics, and her innovative work in ecological writing.Sand engaged in affairs with many artists, including Fryderyk Chopin and Eugène Delacroix. Critics depicted a vampiric woman who sucked the life out of men. The truth, as Ms. Sampson shows, was quite the opposite. Sand practically mothered Chopin and other lovers, who tended to be younger than her. She played an energizing force in their lives.This is a beautifully written and innovative biography. Especially noteworthy are the sections set apart from the narrative and called “impressions” constituting Ms. Sampson’s rumination over significant drawings and photographs that evoke various stages of Sand’s career. Each impression is the biographer’s impression of Sand and of the artist’s impression of her making for a kind of dialogue relatively rare in biography:“Third impression: ComplicityThis is more like it. When I look at this portrait of seventeen-year-old Aurore Dupin, I feel I understand what the fuss is about.The young soon-to-be heiress is painted by an artist almost as young as herself, a twenty-year-old called Jean-Baptiste Bonjour who grew up in the countryside near Neuchâtel. Eighteen twenty-one is his first year as a professional artist: the turning-point at which he’s taken an untrained knack for capturing a likeness and resolved to make a career of it. . . . His subject is at a similar turning-point in her own unconventional, soon-to-be artist’s life . . . Who chooses Jean-Baptise Bonjour to appoint her portrait? Does Aurora know his background, and does it speak to any kind of affinity in this seventeen-year-old bareback rider who so often disappears to race across great tranches of the rolling, apparently empty Berrichon countryside.”Ms. Sampson goes on to treat Sand and Bonjour as copacetic outsiders: “For all the heavy black with which Jean-Baptiste outlines Aurore’s eyes — almost like kohl — there’s complicity in her gaze You think that, if only those spots of reflected light in her irises could be enlarged, you’d see the painter himself reflected in them.”The impression begins with “I” and ends with “you,” making the reader of this biography complicit as well, making biography itself an act of complicity.For all Ms. Sampson’s brilliantly moving in and around George Sand, however, I’m aggrieved on Sand’s behalf. We learn a good deal in a very general sense about her writing but never get much sense of her style, of how she mobilized language, or why certain of her novels, such as “Lélia” were so controversial. We learn that it is a “hugely influential critique of marriage,” but otherwise we learn less about it than Ms. Sampson’s explanation of Chopin’s music.In the novel a young poet, not the poetess, dies for love, unable to consummate a sexual/spiritual union with Lélia, whose name is Greek in origin, meaning fair of speech, eloquence of expression. Stenio, the young poet, drowns himself after a long struggle to come to terms with Lélia’s inability to give herself wholly to him. That she is meant to be Sappho, unable to adjust to the modern world, is apparent in her attitudes and appearance. She suffers from an alienation that is quite Romantic, and a reversal of the Byronic male dominated genre.Dressing in men’s clothing, Ms. Sampson points out, was a power move on Sand’s part, and “Lélia”’s defiance, not only of societal conventions but of Shelleyan romanticism, is a key factor in both her success and the outrage it provoked.In literary biography, it is notoriously difficult to get the balance right between narrative and analysis of a writer’s work, to keep the story going, but to ignore the problem is no solution.Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming ‘Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.’

George Sand’s Life in Full Leaves Her Literary Art Buried

George Sand’s Life in Full Leaves Her Literary Art Buried

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