Horace

by George Sand

Overview

The first English-language edition of a major work by George Sand. Translated by the winner of the 1994 BOMC-PEN Translation Award. "A courageous work, nowadays unjustly neglected". -- Renee Winegarten "Sand develops her most advanced political, social and sexual views in this classic work". -- Feminist Bookstore News

Product Details

BN ID:	2940000735084
Publisher:	B&R Samizdat Express
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	843 KB

About the Author

George Sand est le pseudonyme d'Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, baronne Dudevant, romancière, auteur dramatique, critique littéraire française, journaliste, née à Paris le 1er juillet 1804 et morte au château de Nohant-Vic le 8 juin 1876.

Editorial Reviews

Sand's sympathetic portrayals of the people won her adoration by her readers during her lifetime and scorn by the critics. In this novel about love surpassing conventional barriersdeemed too revolutionary during its day (the early 1840s) for wide dissemination and only now translated into EnglishSand lets rip her radical views on egalitarianism of the classes and equality between the sexes. Set in Paris during the student unrest against the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, in 1832, Horace concerns the coming-of-age of a law student from a provincial family whose head is utterly turned by the opportunities in the big city to better himself both in fortune and in love. Horace is smooth but vain and boastful; he wins the lovely grisette Marthe because he must have passion and the Viscountess de Chailly because he must have glory, though in the end he loses his honor. While some of the characters, such as Marthe, are bland paradigms of working-class virtue, others, like Horace and the Viscountess, have teeth: they were evidently modeled on people in Sand's life. A delicious novel to prompt a revival of her work.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Sand's twentieth-century fame is based more on her radical behavior (for a nineteenth-century woman) than on her fiction. This is due, in part, to the fact that this daring novel has never before been available in English. Here Sand is at her fiery best--forthright, shrewd, and cutting. Considered far too scandalous to be published when Sand wrote it in the 1840s, "Horace" takes place in politically volatile and cholera-besieged Paris where working-class women are stigmatized for their limited means. Horace, a good-looking, undisciplined, and unprincipled dilettante, is supposed to be studying law, but instead wreaks much havoc in the lives of his generous and ever-tolerant friends. His turbulent story is told by Theophile, a medical student of noble birth and much wisdom, who lives with his pragmatic yet compassionate mistress Eugenie. In Eugenie and her friend Marthe, the romantic center of this often polemic but always captivating psychological drama, Sand has created women characters who stand in proud defiance of society's misogyny. Passionate about freedom, Sand forged a timeless tale of vanity and love, hypocrisy and altruism.

Donna Seaman