George Sand leans in
It’s a man’s world, and George Sand knew it centuries before Sheryl Sandberg urged women to “lean in” at work and in life.
The Dream Lover, Elizabeth Berg’s exquisitely captivating historical novel, is told in Sand’s voice: melancholy, intimate, self-aware and heartbreaking. She recognizes the flaws and foibles of all the loves of her life, and loves them nonetheless.
Sand, born Amantine-LucileAurore Dupin to a courtesan and a soldier in 19th-century France, fled a loveless marriage for a life of literary and sensual abandon in Paris. Hired to review plays for Le Figaro, Aurore disguised herself as a man, because men got cheaper theater tickets, and soon took on the nom de plume George Sand to launch her career as a novelist.
Sand’s first novel, Indiana, explored a longing for passion and society’s constraints on women, and became France’s first best seller written by a woman. The incredibly prolific writer wrote more than 80 novels and 35 plays, and became the toast of Paris. She took among her many lovers composers Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, playwright and poet Alfred de Musset and the woman Berg posits was Sand’s true love, actress Marie Dorval.
But then as now, you cannot have it all. Sand and her ex-husband share custody of their children, Maurice and Solange, and Solange in particular resents her mother’s career overtaking her role as a parent.
Sand is eternally driven by the pursuit of love; her passionate (today we might call her “bipolar”) mother, Sophie, ran hot and cold toward her daughter, an ambivalence that haunts Sand.
Sand’s story is especially timely and modern in an era when gender and sexual roles are upended daily. Let’s hope Berg’s novel about a woman whose work and life enchanted men and women ignites new interest in what Sand had to say.