‘Self-called George Sand,’ as Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed her, was a phenomenon in her own time and remains so in the cultural memory. She bestrides the Paris of the 1830s in the collective imagination, puffing on a cigar and dressed in men’s clothes, but with a cinched waist (if we are to believe Gavarni’s famous illustration) that seems to emphasise her femininity. No convention could contain her. No existing model of identity was expansive enough for her and so she invented her own. 

The idea of a word limit was equally anathema to her. Unlike Gustave Flaubert, with whom she developed an unlikely friendship in her later years, she did not spend her literary career searching painfully for the mot juste. Throughout her long life, sentences poured from her pen in such torrents that she was once unkindly called a pisseuse d’encre. Although few of her more than seventy novels are today available in accessible English translations, her fame lives on. Moreover, her idiosyncratic literary voice – with its blend of authentic emotion and performativity, of naturalism and symbolism – still deserves to be heard. At its most interesting, as in her novel Lélia, her experimental lyricism gestures beyond its time towards modernism.

Among English writers, Byron is the only apt comparison. Sand’s adoption of a male pseudonym was later mimicked by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë) and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). But where they were averse to personal publicity, Sand courted it as much as Byron had. She may have initially taken on the name as a disguise, but she ultimately used it to attract attention.

As with Byron, she is famous for taking lovers. Their sheer number leads even the sympathetic author of this new biography to confess that, by 1838, ‘onlooker’s fatigue makes these affairs progressively less interesting’. Sand – who would take more lovers between then and her death in 1876 – was only thirty-four at the time. 

Most famous among these liaisons, and rather more interesting than most, was her decade-long relationship with Frédéric François Chopin, who was almost certainly gay. It was initiated that same year of 1838 after she sent the composer a note: ‘On vous adore. George’. The wording seems sophisticatedly French in its flirtatious avoidance of the first-­person pronoun. But it raises the question as to who the silent ‘I’ behind it really was.

The future George Sand was born in 1804. Compared to the two catchy monosyllables of her nom de plume, her given name was elaborate: Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil. Her family background was equally complicated, and riven by ambiguities of class and status; of belonging and not belonging; of double standards, family rivalries, secrets and lies. Indeed, she grew up in a world in which the very notion of identity was in constant slippage. That, even more than nascent feminism, perhaps best explains her need for self-invention. 

Her father, who died when she was four, had aristocratic antecedents. But he had married a working-class chorus girl who’d already given birth to an illegitimate daughter by another man. His mother, a woman of patrician manners so formal that her own family addressed her in the third person, was not pleased. The young Sand would later be shocked when her grandmother revealed to her, as a horrifying secret, that her mother was that unmentionable thing: a fallen women. And yet the grandmother was herself illegitimate, as was all the bluest blood in the family veins. 

Family dysfunction would later claim Sand’s illegitimate half-brother Hippolyte, the product of a previous liaison of their father’s. He only tardily discovered who he really was and ended up dying an alcoholic in a state of half idiocy, half madness. Sand herself was able to turn her psychological wounds to account, having inherited both her grandmother’s sense of entitlement and her mother’s streetwise survival skills.

Sand’s childhood was nevertheless dominated by the rivalry between these two powerful figures. She adored her dolls as she would later ‘adore’ Chopin, lavishing on them the maternal love she herself only received in a conflicted fashion. The adult Sand may have dressed as a man, taken a male name and gone through lovers like a rake, but she also identified with that ultimate symbol of womanhood: the idealised mother she never had. 

Although one of her affairs was with a woman, the actress Marie Dorval, most of her myriad lovers, Chopin among them, were toyboys. Even Jules Sandeau – the early amour whose name inspired ‘George Sand’ – was younger than she was. Yet when it came to actual rather than symbolic mothering, the toxicity of her early experiences replayed itself in her difficult relationship with her daughter Solange, whose husband Auguste Clésinger at one point threatened Sand with a hammer and a pistol.

In her introduction, Fiona Sampson laments the fact that women writers tend to be reduced by biographers to their private lives, as if their works matter less than those of men. That is indeed often unfairly the case. But with Sand, as with Byron, the life and the work, the private and the public selves, cannot be so easily disentangled. 

As the author of a five-volume Histoire de ma vie (1855) and of the sensational novella Elle et lui (1859) – which spilled the beans on her affair with the poet Alfred de Musset – Sand was a master of autofiction, even when writing outside herself. So it’s understandable that this book, despite its author’s stated anxiety, spends more time telling the life story than on criticism. However, the latter, when it comes, is thought-provoking.  

Readers with an old-fashioned sense of stylistic decorum might find themselves bridling at Sampson’s informal vocabulary (‘dykey’, ‘noodling’); at the fact that the present tense predominates; and at the occasionally confusing chronology. But there’s no doubting that Becoming George is a book written with energy, passion and commitment to its fascinating subject. Indeed, it does just what a literary biography should do: it leaves one wanting to read Sand
for oneself.