Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand

by Benita Eisler

Overview

Who was George Sand? She was the first famous Frenchwoman celebrated throughout Europe who wasn't either a saint or a king's mistress. She was also the first woman in Europe to become a best–selling novelist. But her fame is inseparable from her notoriety: the scandal of leaving a husband and child, setting up in Paris with an eighteen–year–old lover, liaisons and friendships with men of talent and even genius: de Musset, Chopin, Balzac, and Flaubert. Politically engaged, Sand was literally, "there at the revolution," those of 1831 and 1848, reporting, analyzing, denouncing, exhorting. She believed always in Progress as she did in Love, though she was doomed to be betrayed in both. Acclaimed literary biographer Benita Eisler sheds new light on the many roles, triumphs, and losses that together constituted Sand's overwhelming presence. With nearly ninety novels, 20,000 letters, and thousands of pages of autobiographical writings and political commentary, how did Sand also have the time to live? As Eisler reveals, hers seems more like several lives––literary, political, amorous, and domestic. Earlier biographers have either flash–frozen Sand into a feminist icon or blurred her in the dynamic of "child of the century," but Naked in the Marketplace presents Sand at her essence––the outsized persona and the inner woman, along with the unique and irreplaceable role she played in the history of her times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582433813
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

A native New Yorker, Benita Eisler was educated at Smith and Harvard. She has worked as an art editor, reporter, on–camera correspondent, and producer of arts programming for pubic television. Her interest in the varieties of artistic expression is reflected in her teaching and writing: She has taught the nineteenth– and twentiethcentury novel at Princeton and is the author of biographies of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; Lord Byron, and Frédéric Chopin. She lives in Manhattan.

Table of Contents

A Voyage     1
War Zones     11
Liberations     25
Knights Errant     39
True Confessions     51
Rebel into Writer     63
"Madame Dudevant Has Died in Paris..."     79
"Lelia"     91
Two for the Road     103
Double Exposure     117
A Political Education     131
The Long Goodbye     145
The Music Makers     159
The House of Art and the House of Life     173
Separate Tables     185
Children of Paradise     197
A House Divided     209
Lucrezia Floriani     223
The Unmaking of a Radical     235
Stages of Happiness     249
Last Acts     261
Notes and Sources     279
Acknowledgments     293
Index     295

Editorial Reviews

Eisler can write with wit and brio, as when she calls Pierre Huguenin, one of Sand’s more cardboard fictional protagonists, a “lifeless ... recruiting poster for romantic socialism” who’s “never allowed off the ideological leash.”
— The New York Times

Thomas Mallon

Largely expanded from her previous literary study, Chopin's Funeral (2003), Eisler's latest explores the ways in which the early French novelist Sand (1804-76) extracted her literary, intellectual and political sustenance from her numerous lovers. As notorious for her free-loving personal life and cross-dressing fashion as for her atmospheric, revolutionary novels, Sand, n‚e Aurore Dupin, learned early on that freedom for a woman was gained through linking oneself to a powerful man. Eisler goes well into this pleasant-going study on Sand's early sense of abandonment by her mother, Sophie Delaborde, a "pure-blooded daughter of the proletariat" and probable prostitute whose livelihood in Paris ensured that her daughter would be raised by her formidable grandmother at Aurore's dead father Maurice Dupin's Nohant estate. Sophie essentially sold her daughter to the rich Dupin relatives, and the tug of war between Aurore's grandmother and mother took its toll on the young girl. Liaisons with strong, intelligent men formed her early development, while marriage to minor Gascon Baron Casimir Dudevant brought her stimulation and travel, as well as two children. Separation and a dizzying succession of lovers-including affairs early on with the much younger Jules Sandeau, from whom Sand fashioned her nom de plume, and Le Figaro's powerful editor Henri Latouche-launched her on a literary career. Her first novel, Indiana (1832), about the failure of a miserable marriage set in a typically exotic outpost, swept Paris and set the tone for a succession of romances about proto-feminist relationships: Valentine, L‚lia, Mauprat, etc. Curiously, Sand was also mightily attracted to weak-willed, brilliantyounger men who needed maternal nursing, such as Alfred de Musset and Fr‚d‚ric Chopin, and Eisler does a fine job of trying to integrate the many sides of this complex writer and political activist without capitulating to her charm and fame. Indeed, Eisler remains a rather severe moral critic of this fascinating, and rule-bending, personality. Eisler skillfully incorporates much correspondence within a frame of lively writing. Agent: Gloria Loomis/Watkins Loomis Agency Inc.

Kirkus Reviews