I dream so much and live so little that I’m sometimes only three years old. But the next day I’m three hundred, if the dream has been somber. Isn’t it the same with you? Doesn’t it occasionally seem to you as if you’re starting out on life without even knowing what it is, while at other times you feel weighted down by thousands of centuries of which you have but a dim and painful memory? Where do we come from, and where are we going? Anything’s possible because everything’s unknown.
— George Sand to Gustave Flaubert, Sept. 28, 18661
I “met” George Sand when I was twelve years old. In the county library, I noticed a book called Infamous Woman (I’ve always had a soft spot for infamy); I read the book, a biography of Sand, and became infatuated with her. My infatuation has lasted decades and has morphed from fascination with Sand’s personal life to deep appreciation of her ideas and writing.
Sand was a writer of amazing stamina, producing a huge body of work: 70 novels and novellas, two dozen plays, essays galore, decades of daily diary entries, and 25 volumes of correspondence (each volume around 1,000 pages!)2 I’ve enjoyed many of her novels, but my favorite Sand works are autobiographical…
