Review of Becoming George by Fiona Sampson – the remarkable story of a cross-dressing 19th century novelist | books

IIf we’re truly in a reading crisis — whether you blame TikTok or podcasts — it stands to reason that of all genres, literary biography might have a particular reason to fear for its life: Who wants the life story of someone whose books no one has read?

Such anxiety, whether justified or not, can be heard echoing in the background amid some of the louder claims made by Fiona Sampson at the start of her new biography about the pseudonymous 19th-century author George Sand, “one of the most famous writers in the world, at a time when books had something of the magic that would later surround, say, Hollywood films.” Best known for her 1832 novel Indiana, whose young heroine emerges from a loveless marriage due to an age gap, “Sand’s life reveals…the nature of all life as self-invention,” not least because she was scandalously trousers: “By dressing as a garcon, she was cross-dressing, acknowledging that being a woman writer was a little off-center: a strange thing,” Sampson wrote, describing Sand as “one of the “The best women who write.” The boldest precursor to that last hope that modernity may hold: that we may choose what we become.

You don’t need to buy any of that to enjoy the engaging narrative that Sampson sets out to unpack through elegant source sifting and sympathetic conjecture. She convincingly suggests that Sand—born Aurore Dupin in 1804 to a Parisian aristocrat and sex worker—was shaped from her early years by the clash of competing identities, uprooted in early childhood to a chateau in rural France, and raised by her grandmother after her father died when she was four. Returning to the city in adulthood, she launched herself as a writer, wandering the city, cross-dressing and smoking cigars. Undaunted, she won custody of her children after leaving her beating husband, and embarked on love affairs with the pianist Frédéric Chopin, the actress Marie Dorval (or so the rumour was) and the writer Alfred de Musset – an entanglement that, after his death, became the basis for the erotic autobiographical novel Elle et Lui (1859), an autofiction. Before the message.

Sand’s novels were read as much because of her correspondence, including a devoted 12-year dialogue with Flaubert. Sampson points to a letter sympathetic to the terror felt by a new bride on her wedding night, which is frequently quoted but often ignores the practical element of advice in the letter in favor of presenting Sand as somehow anti-sexist: “Tell me [the bridegroom] To cut off his happiness for a little while and wait until his wife gradually comes to him so that he can understand her and respond to her. Sampson goes on to explain that Sand was never innocent, because she grew up deep in the country among the desolate wilderness — the kind of imaginative musings that Becoming George specializes in, with variable results. Regarding the marital conflict that Sand’s mother experiences after she loses her child, Sampson says: “It is every woman who feels that her husband does not support her in the extremes of grief…”

Cosmopolitanism can feel too keen to reassure the modern reader – at one point, Sand is compared to a “delicious mummy” and her habit of reading aloud to her grandmother as a teenager is explained as follows: “In the 21st century this would seem on the mend, even comfortably monastic, but in the 19th century it has become a form of shared narrative entertainment that is the closest equivalent of crowding on the sofa to watch television together.” Sampson’s present-tense narrative thrusts us forward all the time, as if we are always in danger of losing interest. Paragraphs frequently begin with a sudden drop in the needle, drawing our attention back. “But this is three decades in the future,” Sampson writes, resetting the scene. “On that summer evening in 1823, Aurore was just… a young wife missing her husband”; Exactly the same trick is used on the opposite page: “But not yet. Now she is a young mother who needs all the confidence that intimacy can provide.”

However, the sense that we are being given a powerful story without being quite sure why grows. While Sampson worries that Sand’s colorful life overshadows her art, the book’s approach does little to address this. Its subtitle, The Invention of George Sand, suggests a dual focus—authorship and self-authorship—but it is the latter story, The Life, that dominates much of the material excavated from Sand’s five-volume autobiography. Ultimately, Sampson’s claim that Sand was “one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century” does not receive much support, as the biography runs through nearly two dozen of her more than 70 titles in just two pages toward the end. An opportunity is missed to emphasize Sand’s contemporary relevance: Mobra, her 1837 story of a tough hero tempered by love, is plausibly inspired by Wuthering Heights – but the connection is missing and Sampson dismisses it as an “improbable fantasy”.

Even for Sampson, Sand’s importance seems to lie less in her writing than in what she represents as a woman overcoming the hardships of her sexist environment—no wonder, given that the diarist Edmond de Goncourt praised Sand’s talent after her death in 1876 by noting that an autopsy would have shown that her clitoris was “a bit like our penis.” You can see what Sand was up against; No matter how understandable the motives of this biography are, there is a gap at its heart.