Famous people from central france: George Sand, famous writer from La Chatre area

Born in Paris in July 1804 as Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, she became baroness Dudevant by marriage to Casimir Dudevant. In 1831 aged 27 she joined Jules Sandeau whose name she took in part, to create her pseudonym. She was engaged at the “Figaro” as a writer and very quickly was mixing with Alexander Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset and Honoré de Balzac. Later she met with Delacroix, Liszt, Chopin and Tourgueniev.

Her home at Nohant, dates from the 12^th Century but was totally rebuilt in the 18^thC. It was here that she wrote her first big success, 'Indiana'. She first came to Nohant when she was 4 years old to live with her grandmother. She loved it dearly “this land around Nohant where I was brought up, where I have spent all my life, and where I wish I could die…” and so she did aged 72 and is buried in the grounds of the small church behind her home. She became known as ‘the good lady of Nohant’ and entertained the most illustrious writers, composers, and thinkers of her day. A large garden surrounds her home and is open to visitors, free. Guided tours are available around the house. There is also a museum and small shop on the site. Nohant Vicq is situated a few kilometres north of La Châtre.

Some her of books In English - available from Amazon

INDIANA

The first novel that George Sand wrote without a collaborator, Indiana is not only a romance but also a powerful plea for change in the inequitable French marriage laws of the time, for better education for women, and for a new attitude to their position in society. Naomi Schor's introduction explores attitudes to Sand in her own time as well as more recent feminist responses, and it examines the powerful and complex patterns of imagery and relationships in the novel.

English Version

THE DEVILS POOL

In a new translation The Devil's Pool is one of a group of pastoral novels inspired by the countryside of Nohant in Berry, where George Sand grew up. These novels are simple stories of country life, in which Sand records local customs and manners, depicting a timeless idyll, unaffected by the outside world and the political events of the time. With his wife dead, and three young children to look after, ploughman Germaine decides that the time has come to marry again. He embarks on a journey to meet a rich widow, Catherine Leonard, in a match which has been approved by his father-in-law; but he finds her proud and vain, and surrounded by other suitors. Germaine prefers the company of Marie, a young shepherdess from his own village, but she is insistent that she wants a younger, more suitable husband... 'Early deaths and endemic poverty are treated here as part of natural life; and natural life, with its indomitable, instinctive force for continuity, is what she is celebrating... it seems to me a book... worth reading more than once.' - Victoria Glendinning

GEORGE SAND - BIOGRAPHY

George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange.

Drawing on archival sources, much of it neglected by Sand’s previous biographers, Elizabeth Harlan examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand’s writing and defined her life. Why was Sand’s relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women’s liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand’s identity, Harlan examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand’s mother and grandmother, and Sand’s own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.

If you want to use any of the images (other than from the PHOTO LIBRARY which are free to use) please contact us to discuss their use.

Text from this site is not permitted to be copied and re-used in any format.