Letters of George Sand, Vol. I (in Three Volumes)

"What a brave man she was," said novelist Ivan Turgenev, "and what a good woman." French writer and feminist Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, aka GEORGE SAND (1804-1876), smoked in public and dressed like a man, carried on scandalous romantic affairs and was an intimate of Chopin and Flaubert...and wrote some of the most intriguing works of 19th-century French literature: novels, plays, autobiographies, literary criticism, and political treatises. This three-volume 1886 collection of her correspondence sheds light on her personality, morality, and ideas on religion, all of which molded the philosophies on women's sexuality and women's freedom that she is famous for today, and aids a deeper understanding of her work and her place in the history of feminism. Volume I begins with a detailed biographical sketch and features the letters of the eight-year-old Mademoiselle Aurore, the young woman she was to become, and the mature artist we remember her as. From her early literary endeavors to the secrets of her cultured society and the friendships and work she was engaged in to her early notoriety in the 1840s, which appears to have bothered her not one whit, this is a fascinating look at the shaping of a woman who would shape Western society at large.

George Sand is the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, a 19th century French novelist and memoirist. Sand is best known for her novels Indiana, L?lia, and Consuelo, and for her memoir A Winter in Majorca, in which she reflects on her time on the island with Chopin in 1838-39. A champion of the poor and working classes, Sand was an early socialist who published her own newspaper using a workers co-operative and scorned gender conventions by wearing men s clothing and smoking tobacco in public. George Sand died in France in 1876.