Becoming George

byFiona Sampson

The Invention of George Sand

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Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself - cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society.

What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day - from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself?

In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.

'From [Sampson's] approach emerges a writer who seems as alive as if she had just walked out of the room and could return at any minute. Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers... She would also have enjoyed Sampson’s quietly witty touches. When Sand died... Hugo sent a tribute claiming: “I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.” Many readers will start this fascinating biography with the assumption that he was merely being polite. By the time they have finished it they will probably agree with him.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

About Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, writer, and Romanticist. Professor Emerita of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, she has received numerous national and international literary awards, and her work has been published in thirty-eight languages.


Becoming George completes a trilogy of acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley was an Observer, Independent, Financial Times, and Times Book of the Year. Two-Way Mirror was a Washington Post Book of the Year, a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the US PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld International Award for Biography.
Details
  • Imprint: Doubleday
  • ISBN: 9781529924336
  • Length: 400 pages
  • Dimensions: 242mm x 36mm x 164mm
  • Weight: 612g
  • Price: £22.00
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