The Most Scandalous Author in 19th-Century France

By the age of 30, George Sand's literary career was soaring. She was internationally renowned, outselling Victor Hugo in English. So why is she now better known for wearing mens clothes and having a relationship with Chopin? In this episode, Kate is joined once again by Fiona Sampson to meet the woman behind the name. Who was Aurore Dupin? Why did she dress in men's clothes? And why have her literary achievements been overwritten in the history books by her personal life? Fiona's book on this is 'Becoming George: The invention of George Sand'. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  This is Steve Covino from Covino and Rich. Quick trivia, fellas. Every guy listening is a contestant. Answer honestly to yourself. You got a belly and a little chest? Gassed by the afternoon, no drive left in the tank? You lack that confidence and mental edge? Those are classic signs that your testosterone's been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. So why not take matters into your own hands? Strip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma GLP-1 Booster. Every serving is packed with science-backed ingredients that crank up your natural GLP-1 production. Visit bioma.health/glep1 and use code CRSHOW for 15% off your first order.

• 1:52Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwixter Sheets. Hello, it's so nice to see you again. But before I can let you go any further into this podcast, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adult things in an adult way, covering a range of subjects used by an adult too. Are you fully briefed? Do you feel prepared? Right then, proceed at your own peril.

• 2:19Kate Lister?

  Ah bonjour! It is a beautiful day here in the heart of France. It's the mid 1800s, a light breeze plays among the leaves on the trees and the birds are singing. Ah, an idyll in a country wrought with revolutions. Yep, plural. We are at the famous Noire, a family estate turned gathering place for the literary and musical and artistic elite. Ooh la la! Here is our host, sitting astride a horse and wearing men's breeches. This is Georges Sand. And don't let the name or the posture or the attire fool you. Georges is a literary icon, a society leader, a revolutionary and a woman. Ready to find out more? I know I am.

• 3:25Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Imagine you wrote a book. No, no, no. Imagine you wrote lots of books. Actually, imagine you wrote over 70 books. You're probably feeling pretty good about yourself, thinking your legacy is complete. There is no doubt in your mind that people will be remembering your work for centuries to come. Nothing could possibly overshadow your artistic genius, except for maybe your clothes, how you dared to wear your trousers. Oh, and your relationships, of course. You had an affair with Chopin. Who? Chopin, piano guy, yeah? And as a result of that, your books are going to be all but forgotten. Well, today on Betwixt the Sheets, I have a returning guest.

• 4:08Kate Lister?

  We've previously had Fiona Sampson on to talk about Mary Shelley and now she's back to reintroduce us to Georges Sand, her life, her work, and to set us straight on this literary giant's personal life. Back to 19th century France we go! Let's do it!

• 4:30Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Fiona Sampson. How are you doing?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I'm great, thanks, Kate, and thank you for having me back.

• 4:39Kate Lister?

  Well, of course, we're going to have you back because your latest book launch is imminent, and to give it its full title, Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand. How's all that going? Are you excited?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  I am excited, yes. Thank you, Kate. I mean, last time we were talking about Mary Shelley, and in between I did a biography of Elizabeth Bath-Browning. Each time, I feel I have to adjust my loyalties, not only my whole memory and my conceptual compass, but I have to fall in love with each of them. So I'm feeling a little bit as though I'm cheating on Mary and Elizabeth. I'm just about getting into, you know, I'm accepting, it's kind of serial monogamy.

• 5:16Kate Lister?

  I love that. We're with George at the moment. There'll be people listening, I imagine, who don't know the name George Sand, because a strange thing happens with a lot of women throughout history, especially women artists, is they can achieve great fame in their lifetime, but they rarely hold on to it. And George Sand seems to be one of those.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Kate, you're singing from my song sheet, exactly this. That's exactly why I worked on Elizabeth Bath-Browning, and in a way, almost Mary Shelley, too, because although everyone's heard of Frankenstein, even a few years ago, I guess when the book was less of a set text in school, everyone knew Frankenstein the film, but they kind of forgot this amazing young teenager had written it. And it's the same with George Sand. For me, because I started life as a classical musician, she's this name who's been part of the kind of cultural wallpaper, in a way. But she's another of these astonishing women, as you rightly say, who are our artistic and literary kind of grandmother, great grandmothers, and our tradition, whom we allow to kind of slip through our fingers. And you're right. I

• 6:20Speaker 03

  mean, in her day, she was absolutely a central cultural figure. She was regarded by all the other, I'm going to say other, not just, in other words, they weren't the only ones, but all the other great novelists of her time, as a great writer, a great novelist, you know, whether it's Balzac or... Uh, Hugo or Flaubert or

• 6:40Kate Lister?

  Big names.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  In this country, I don't know, Matthew Arnold, big, big names. I mean, the Bronte sisters adored her work.

• 6:46Kate Lister?

  Oh, good.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Imitated him. Westmore Heights is a long, is very much a kind of, in a way, it's a homage to George Sand. Of course, it's not. It's a great story. But, you know, Emily Bronte was incredibly influenced by reading Sand. So Sand gave permission to women writers, but she was also incredibly admired. She was notorious in her lifetime, but she was also really the notori- the notoriety was almost like a byproduct of her fame, her literary fame. She is famous. Oh, what can we say about to, you know, put her down? Oh, we'll

• 7:19Kate Lister?

  We'll find something.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. Whereas since, as you rightly say, the huge body of work, which I know we'll talk about the sheer, sheer scale of it, has vanished. And what we remember at most is, oh, wasn't she notorious? Didn't she wear trousers sometimes? And didn't she have enough wearers Chopin? That's the most that most people know, even people who, you know, maybe not okay in France, and maybe not Franco-Phones. And it's tragic. Because if we are sent to that, we are sending to that happening to that erasure, we're having cancellation nearly, we have, we're sending to that happening to us in our turn. We have to keep repeating these names.

• 7:56Kate Lister?

  We do. I mean, being remembered for wearing trousers and shagging Chopin isn't the worst thing in the world, but but there's so much more that she should be remembered for. So can you paint us a bit of a picture? Who was she? And let's talk about her origins. Where did she come from?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and thank you. I think she's really interesting for her time. I mean, when you're telling the story of a woman who is, has a had a tremendous achievement, kind of against the grain of her society, you have to locate her in that society. And George Sand was not born, George Sand, fairly obviously, because it's a man's name. She was born Amantine Auror Lucile Dupin de Foncoy.

• 8:38Kate Lister?

  Oh, well done. You sound ever so sexy, Fiona, when you say that.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. I wish.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  It's a sexy language, isn't it? It is, it absolutely is, yes. And by the way, while we're talking about her French, one of the great things about George Sand is because she was an autodidact, she writes a really accessible French. You know, it's not a kind of throat-clearing literary stuffy languages like Mary Shelley. It kind of powers through the intervening two centuries with like real personality and clarity. Yeah, she's a wonderful writer. Anyway, so she's born, she wasn't so unusual in having those three names and she was called Auror, by the way, that was the one the family picked for her. She was Auror Dupin. But the Dupin de Francais is really interesting because it denotes the fact that her father's family was so aristocratic that he was an

• 9:27Speaker 03

  illegitimate relationship of the family, the aristocrats who owned that huge famous chateau at Châneau de So, the one with the arches that go right across the river. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. I know. Okay. So immense wealth thing. And she herself was kind of bifurcated because classic thing, her father's an aristocratic cavalry officer, her mother's a cool girl from Paris. That old story. Typical, you know. Yes. Exactly. And Auror was incredibly lucky that they married. They married a month before she was born. So she was conceived as, you know, they were having, they were living together, but luckily for her, because it meant all sorts of things to do as respectfully, it also meant she would inherit. And that turned out to be, you know, formative for

• 10:12Speaker 03

  her life that she inherited. So she had a kind of security. A shotgun wedding? Obviously, yeah. Yeah, a month, a month before, yeah. I mean, when you're eight months pregnant, I mean, it's kind of fairly apparent, isn't it? Yes. And what's interesting about that too, is that both her father and her mother had an illegitimate child already. So her father already had an illegitimate son who was being brought up kind of among the servants of his mother's household. Wow. And Auror's mother already had a daughter, Caroline, father, who knows, unknown. So both of them have kind of gone through that before. And maybe that's why this time, maybe they just were in love. And I think they were in love. Just gonna ask you that. Yes. Well, I've thought a lot about that because Sophie Victoire was obviously

• 10:55Speaker 03

  many things, including not a great mother and chaotic and so on. But wouldn't she be if you'd had an abusive childhood? Because she was on the streets at 13 at the latest, possibly younger. Wow, okay. Yeah, she had a. Yeah, her father died. Her father was a bird catcher. He used to sell birds along the Paris Keys. And then her stepfather was also a bird catcher, but a more successful one. In other words, he had a stall in a market, real step up. But, you know, he threw the girls out. Sophie Victoire had a sister. So really tough life. She ends up a call girl. She ends up in a chorus, inverted commas, of a review, you know, really not good news. She's a child and she's being, in a sense, trafficked.

• 11:33Kate Lister?

  There's a real clash then. He comes from like, serious, serious money and she was homeless at thirteen, fourteen.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Exactly. He comes from serious money, but there's still a zigzag of illegitimacy because his mother, who was quite a grande dame by the time little Auror knew her, and by the time indeed she ended up bringing up little Auror, she was called Marie Auror de Sax. And she was the illegitimate daughter of the Marshal of France, the Marshal de Sax, Maurice de Sax, who was a kind of hero of France and huge establishment figure. And he in turn was the illegitimate son of the man who went on to be the King of Poland, King Augustus the Second.

• 12:17Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  So a real, this kind of zip cord of, you know, illegitimacy going through the family. And also interesting, I think, on that side, although I'm not sure how much Georges, I'm calling her Georges, Auror Georges, was aware of this, is that the mother of the great Marshal of France was a courtier herself. And she was called Maria Aurora von Kernigsberg, which isn't particularly interesting in itself. But she was a literary lady at that very early time. And she was very close to a group around the Swedish, as well as the Polish court, where there were some very early women writers. So there's

• 13:02Speaker 03

  this sense of, yeah, this kind of almost encoded. I mean, I don't myself particularly believe in genetic talent as such, but you know, there's something encoded in the family story that comes down. And then there's her mother, who's, you know, at her most generous, what Georges says about her, adult Georges says about her. She could sing very sweetly, you know, she had the soul of an artist and had she had a proper education and training, she could have been something. But as it was, you know, it was just kind of being on the stage. And yeah, exactly. And so a kind of, I would say, latterly, a kind of embitteredness, you know, that kind of balked one. So this is a schism.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And it's also the other thing, I guess we just should think of before I shut up on this topic.

• 13:49Kate Lister?

  Don't shut up. That's what you're here for.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I want to talk to you, but is that this is, you know, revolutionary France. So it's not uncomplicated to be the descendant of Aztecats, to be proud of that, but also perhaps defensive about it. And, you know, this is a time when suddenly the names for everything have suddenly changed. Suddenly there were no longer ducemmes, but départements. So suddenly they're not in Berry, the old, you know, dukedom, they're in Andre, the, the new départements. Well, they will be when Aurora is four, you know, because I don't think she can be expected to have remembered much from when she's, you

• 14:31Speaker 03

  know, a toddler in Paris. And there's a revolutionary calendar that even days, the days of the year, well, the year starts, the days of the year were all these ridiculous, you know, names of farming implements and so on, which goodness knows how anybody remembered them.

• 14:45Kate Lister?

  It wasn't very popular, was it, that the revolutionary calendar where they renamed every day and every month and even the actual, the hours and minutes. So you'd say something like, it's the plough shear of snowy, the seventh of fish. And it just, what? Didn't catch on.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  No, I mean, goodness knows how they remembered, really.

• 15:04Kate Lister?

  So was it a happy childhood?

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it was actually. I mean, it was, she had a doting father. Big tragedy when she's just turned four, her father dies in a fall from a horse.

• 15:16Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  The horse is perhaps too much for anyone to handle. And Sophie Victoire always regretted he'd been given it. I mean, regretted he'd been given it before he was thrown and killed. But he was given it as a sort of reward for his military exploits because it's Napoleonic France, he's in the army. So he's the aide de camp for General Joachim Mura, who is leading Napoleonic forces who go and do lots of atrocities in Spain.

• 15:44Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  So there's that problematic thing as well. And Strangely, when Aurora is three, her mother, perhaps she's worried he's been away from her side for too long, she's a little bit worried he might stray, or whatever. She takes the little girl and they go to Madrid. This is a Madrid that is, you know, portrayed by Goya, the atrocities and massacres by the Napoleonic forces of unarmed civilians. Yeah, it's a really dangerous, deeply problematic, but Aurora is only three. And so what she remembers is that they're billeted in a palace and she remembers the palace.

• 16:18Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  She also remembers her little brother is born. Her little brother is born frail and they make their way back after a few months to France and they're going through the desolation, the horrors of the battlefield. So they are hitching rides with, you know, soldiers who are wounded. I mean, it's just atrocious, you know, there's nothing to drink that isn't polluted with blood. I mean, it's just vile. Yeah, really, really, really traumatic. And perhaps not surprisingly, as is the way of things, the little boy doesn't really survive the journey. He dies shortly after they've arrived. And where they arrive back at is her grandmother's house, so her paternal grandmother, so Marie Aurora de Saxes.

• 17:02Kate Lister?

  Even if she had never done anything apart from grow up and get married and have babies, that is still a hell of a dramatic story that that she's been through, even just as a small child. When does she, it's crazy. When does she start writing? Is that something that she'd always done or is that something that she came to a bit later?

• 17:21Speaker 03

  No, it isn't. And in fact, she's a late starter. So two things happen. One is that when she's thirteen, she's getting a bit hard for her grandmother to handle because her grandmother ends up bringing her up, as you can imagine, in Nuremberg. She's sent off to a Paris convent and actually settles really, really well, becomes very popular. And one of the things that she does there is she starts to write and also put on little plays. And they make her very popular in the convent community, which isn't just nuns and pupils. It's also, you know, that high you to a nunnery, that the kind of single women, the odd women who are who are living there. So there's a whole community. It's an enclosed, you know, order. They can't go out. So she she puts on plays, including by Molière, but she also writes plays. So that's sad. But then her grandmother notices she's acquiring a vocation and quickly whips her away

• 18:05Speaker 03

  to be a companion back in Nohon because the idea of the convent was to be a finishing school, not to kind of become a religious. And then there's no sort of sense of continuing being a writer at all on her own terms. She's only fifteen, sixteen. You know, she writes letters, but the start of, you know, prolific letter writing. I mean, one of the things about George Sand is she's so prolific, there is so much to read. I mean, just her letters alone, I mean, literally thousands. So that, so no, and it's only much later on, after she's been married, I mean, years, years later, and the marriage is sort of falling apart, that she's kind of toying with, oh, what could I do? Oh, I could paint, do a little decorate friends' kind of bibeloves, I could decorate their

• 18:50Speaker 03

  snuff boxes and so on. Oh, no, no, I'm, I'll try writing some stories. So it's much, much later, it's not till eighteen thirty, eighteen thirty-one, that she makes a break for freedom in Paris, by which time she's got two children with a younger man. She's by then twenty-six, which is not old, but of course, in the nineteenth century, where everyone seems to start everything so young, it seems old. Yes. And she's got this younger lover who's nineteen, who's a law student, and they, they try writing together. Who's he? Who's this? Who's this young lover? He's her third lover that we know of by now. Oh, George, right, okay. Her third extramarital lover. And he's called Jules Sandau. And she meets him at the house of a mutual friend, as is so often the case.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  The local market town is called La Chartre. I mean, it's a fairly, I shouldn't really say this, but fairly undistinguished market town. It's not even nowadays particularly pretty by the standards of, you know, la France profonde. And yet, interestingly, it has its own kind of local intellectual community, largely made up of either sort of Lawyers and doctors who've gone to Paris, had their education, come back. Or young men who are students who are going off to Paris and then they come back in the summer and they are there in La Chate. And Georges is introduced by her half-brother, the illegitimate Ibolit, to this community. And she's become friends with them. And the three glorious days of July happened in eighteen thirteen. It's like, oh, my God, the country's going through another upheaval.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  And Georges rides over to the house, which is of course a chateau of one of these friends, Chateau de Coudre, and meets up, you know, what's going on, what's going on? And sees in the garden this fair-haired youth, Jules Sandau, sitting under a pear tree. And they start a summer affair.

• 20:35Kate Lister?

  Easily done.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Easily done, although, you know.

• 20:38Kate Lister?

  Not really, though, was it? Like, it wasn't.

• 20:42Kate Lister?

  Is she supposed to be doing this, a well-to-do girl, having it away with young men she finds underneath pear trees, several of them?

• 20:50Speaker 03

  It puts a whole new spin on Isaac Newton and the apple, doesn't it?

• 20:52Kate Lister?

  Certainly does. She sounds like a bit of a goer, even from.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  He was a real goer, yeah, she was. And what's very hard to understand for me is that she had a type which is a younger man. She, you know, just doesn't have to be my own type. So she has a type who, that is a younger man.

• 21:10Kate Lister?

  Like, how much younger, like, what we're talking, is it like a bit like?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  This is only seven years, but nineteen to twenty-six is already. And he sets the template so that by the time she gets together with her final relationship with Alex Altamont, so, which, you know, much, much later, who she gets together with when she's forty-five, he's thirty, you know.

• 21:28Kate Lister?

  So just, just younger men, then, this isn't like, like, worryingly young.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Fifteen years, I mean, younger men and frail younger men.

• 21:38Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Will be the same, yeah, they are, you know, anyway. So she falls for Jules and, and also she has, she looks after them. She tends to look after them financially and also in practical terms.

• 21:51Kate Lister?

  Sugar mama.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, she is, she is.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Balzac calls her a maternal nymphomaniac. Oh my god, Balzac, coming from him, my goodness. I know. So, yeah, so it's a little bit. So, to my mind, inexplicably, but she falls through Jules' window. Then conveniently, in the autumn, when he's gone back to Paris, she discovers her husband's will. Whoa, whoa, she's married? When did this happen? She got married at 18. So she became an heiress at 17, when her grandmother died. And nine months later, she was married. Boom, look at that. Yeah. And nine months after that, her son is born. Okay. And she then has two affairs, and Jules is the third of them. So she's got two kids, both within the marriage, although the second child is probably the result of an affair.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  But we don't know. Kind of 50/50, so we can't say she is because we don't know. And since there are no surviving descendants, there can be no, you know, DNA that will ever solve that. There are grandchildren, but there's no generation beyond that.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  I'll be back with Fiona and George after this short break.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Was it a happy marriage? Like, was it? No, terrible marriage. So she marries a local, country, landowner, kind of hunt and shoot and fish in, which she thinks is fine, because that's the masculinity she's used to. Yeah. A father's a military man. Her adored, actually, half-brother, who's older, is military too. He's also an officer. He will die as a drunkard, but he's, you know, so they like good living. I imagine they're quite loud. So, no, she marries Casimir.

• 24:52Kate Lister?

  That kind of thing.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Probably, yes, at the least. Yes, exactly. And Casimir, it becomes a drunk. And although I have to say, you know, she is pretty terrible to him in terms of, she's quite manipulative in those early years of marriage in terms of, you know, oh, well, it's so, if you want me to be happy, you need to do X and Y. On the other hand, you know, they're married in 1822. By 1824, he's already, you know, hit her in public. Oh, no. Oh, that's, that's That will trigger Really not good. Oh, dear. No, no. I mean, a real drunken brute, really, by the end. Okay. Probably jolly when younger, but then, you know, he doesn't know what he's doing in life.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  He hasn't really got a purpose in life. His life doesn't turn out well, and his marriage doesn't turn out well. And he becomes, you know, he becomes the lowest common denominator. So you can see why she'd be desperate to leave. And she finds his will in 1830, and his will, she'd sort of thought, he's brutish, but he loves me. Yeah. But the will is full of kind of contempt and, you know, this awful woman and I kind of disinheriting her and so on. And this is, the time is quite convenient, because it gives her sort of moral permission to say, well, the marriage is over. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Paris. I'm going to come back every three months. So I'm going to alternate three months, Paris, three months back home with my kids, three months, Paris, three months back home with my kids.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  And again, that wouldn't have been quite so extraordinary in an era when the children had nursemaids and, you know, a tutor, all of that. You know, children weren't brought up by their parents in the same way. So she doesn't abandon the kids, but she does. She goes off to Paris and at first she lives in a property that belongs to Ibrilite, but he realizes that she's carrying on with Sando and won't have part of, any part of it. So she moves in with Sando and almost immediately, I mean, like in the first three months, she has literary success, which is the more extraordinary because she hasn't really been practicing it at home. Yeah, it's very, very strange.

• 26:54Kate Lister?

  What did she write? Did she write about my adventures with teenagers under a pear tree by George Shant?

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Well, she does write love stories to begin with. I mean, she, she, she turns up, she's lucky. She's got an introduction to the editor of the Figaro, who is called Henri de Latouche, and he happens to be from La Chartre also, one of this, this community of intellectuals between Paris and La Chartre, which as I say, is so extraordinary because La Chartre is not, it's not like Tours or, you know, some city, some provincial city. No, it's just a little market town. Anyway, a mutual friend sends an introduction and she turns up with a romantic manuscript, you know, a romance. And he reads it and says, well, it's a pile of nonsense, but your own speaking, writing voice is good. And he gives her a desk at the Figaro. He puts her on the staff.

• 27:44Kate Lister?

  Oh my God. What? Like, what writers get, wouldn't we all like that? Yeah, that's gone to somewhere quite deep on behalf of all writers that you could just hand over a manuscript. Well, it's rubbish, but here's a job.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. But I think that he must have seen something in her that was literary because, you know, the Figaro was his baby and I don't think he would have risked it.

• 28:03Kate Lister?

  Was that a big deal, the Figaro?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Yes, it was already there.

• 28:06Kate Lister?

  Okay. That's like a magazine, is it?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  It wasn't daily yet, but it, well, it became a daily newspaper, but then, and kind of a newspaper record, but at that point it's still a magazine. It's more like a literary magazine.

• 28:16Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  But still. And also I'm pretty sure that he was gay. So it wasn't that, there wasn't that ulterior motive. I think he's a pretty admirable figure because later on also he gives her his apartment. When he retires, he goes to live, you know.

• 28:29Kate Lister?

  A good guy. Hoorah.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, a really good guy. And, you know, almost needless to say, not a heterosexual good guy.

• 28:39Kate Lister?

  We almost had one. We almost had one.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, we almost had one. So, and at the same time, then he, he realizes that the lovers are short of money and a kind of commercial novelist has recently died and he gives the couple this ghostwriting gig. Okay. So he's only taken on Aurora, she still is.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  At the Figaro, but he offers a couple, a ghostwriting gig. If you can write this novel under the, under the name of the deceased author, it's called The Commissioner, in four weeks. And they do.

• 29:09Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  I mean, probably Auror does most of it, but yeah, they do. And as a result of that, the publishers are so pleased with them that they say, okay, you can do one of your own. So again, Henri de la Touche intervenes and says, well, it's not perhaps fair that you're called Jules Sando, is it? Because so the first one is obviously it goes to writing, so it's pseudonymous. Why don't you call yourselves J. Sand? So J for Jules, but Sand, not Sondo, but Sand. And again, they deliver and it comes out just before Christmas and it does well commercially. But Auror has had to do most of the writing of it.

• 29:46Kate Lister?

  So when they talk about the invisible labour of women, this is what they mean.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah. It gets worse, as these things so often do. So Auror is going backwards and forwards. So her next time back in Paris is spring, is April eighteen thirty two.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  And she comes back with a manuscript of her own, which is Indiana, which is going to be a huge success. Will be a bestseller, will be, you know, revolutionise what the novel can do and so on. And, and it is, she comes back, but she comes back willy nilly. But there's cholera epidemic in Paris. She comes back and she brings her three year old Solange, echoes of her mother with her.

• 30:27Kate Lister?

  Oh dear, okay.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Did she not know there was a, you know, what was going on? Was she so ambitious that, who knows? But anyway, she comes back and they do all survive, they don't get cholera, they survive. And Indiana comes out and is this huge literary sensation? Because it's well written and it has a kind of, right from the beginning, she writes in the same way she writes her letters, in this very engaged way. She's, it's clearly a woman's writing. She is not effusive, but powered by kind of emotion and emotional drive. She is really, there's a real authorial presence in the writing. And it's right from the beginning, it's writing that's about the condition of women.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  But it's never lecturing, it's always, she, she allows the emotions and ideals to kind of inform what one should think. So the first novel is all about the misery of an arranged marriage versus, in the end, happy love achieved by living in sin, in Mauritius, actually, as it happens. God love to live in sin in Mauritius, wouldn't you? Well, exactly. And also really interesting is that Indiana has global majority heritage. Indiana is Creole. Wow. Indiana is, yeah. Very progressive. Exactly. And she's the protagonist, it's from her viewpoint, she's more emotional, passionate, these things are seen as good, as truth telling, rather than as, oh, the

• 32:00Speaker 03

  mad woman in the attic. Yes. You know, the whole. Yes, that's the. Rochester and then why to Sargasso Sea. They were quite racist, colonial, those texts, weren't they? People want to have, want to have that conversation just yet, but they were. Exactly, exactly. But overall, manage it not to be. She's written this novel as G Sand, to distinguish herself from the novel she wrote with. Where's the dopey boy friend in all of this? This is just by her, is it? It's still hanging around. But then her second novel, which comes almost immediately, Valentine, she signs a contract, which nearly all the money, despite the fact, actually, she needs money because she's not getting allowance from her husband, so will go to buy him out of the draft.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Oh, hello. Right, okay. And meanwhile, he's, in the summer of eighteen thirty-two, while she's madly writing the next novel, number number two, Valentine, which is, you know, the whole second album problem, but she does it, and does it incredibly quickly and is a great success. She's bought him out, she's given him, in a sense, all the proceeds. And he kind of is moaning to his friends and gradually he alienates the whole social group, which of course is really his social group, because it's all the blokes. And, you know, can't be both to come and see her, because they're both, they've both come back down to the south for the summer.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Well, not all the, all the way south, but, you know, down to And, and, yeah. He just basically takes the money and runs.

• 33:29Kate Lister?

  So he takes the money, whinges on, and then everybody gets a little bit bored of him. Interesting. Okay, so her star is very much on the rise. I can't imagine that she puts up with a whingey mopey boyfriend whinging on for too long.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  She doesn't, but she's gonna have form in that area. I mean, she really is. I don't know. I think, you know, one wants to say lots of things. Did she have terribly low self-esteem really as a result of losing her parents? Who knows? You know, she really puts up with quite a lot for someone who's such a, has such a flamboyant external.

• 34:03Kate Lister?

  We see this all the time. Like, Mary, Mary Wollstonecraft was another one. Pioneering feminist, had sex with the worst men ever.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Emma, Imla, yeah, absolutely. Yes, I know. Wants to kill herself ever. I know. So, yes. So maybe it's a kind of shame, a kind of tall poppy syndrome. If you're a woman, you're doing really, really well or something. It's hugely interesting. Of course, this is another reason why these 19th century women are so interesting, because we can kind of try and reconstruct the psyche, reconstruct what was really happening and ask those questions for ourselves, but without being coloured by, you know, the things that we don't realise, we've internalised and that sort of thing. I mean, they kind of write it large for us, don't they?

• 34:48Kate Lister?

  I do. I heard of a term being used amongst Gen Z, and the term was hobo sexual. And that's a man that moves in and just uses all your stuff and becomes a bit of a parasite.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, that's so good.

• 35:01Kate Lister?

  Is that so good? I know. God bless Gen Z. Is that what we're dealing with here? A hobo sexual?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  I think he is. Yes, I think he is. But here's where Henri de La Touche's last gift to Georges comes in. She, she cuts off by going to live with him. And although she still finds an apartment for Jules, because poor little boy, he can't do it for himself. And she calls him little Jules and so on. She does all that. Nevertheless, she's no longer cohabiting.

• 35:29Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right. So there's a divide there. Does she have other lovers at the same time?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yes, this is the start of her years of rebellion.

• 35:38Kate Lister?

  Oh, I love it. I love it. Okay.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  So eighteen thirty three is her most prolific year, I think. So she is, um, she has a one night stand with Prosper Mary May, who will become famous for Carmen, is already famous as a travel writer. And she becomes a scandal of Paris because she tells a friend, oh, I had Mary May last night and he was five foot five inches. And Alexandre Dumas sends this all around Paris as, you know, the five inches is casting aspersions on his manhood.

• 36:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, no. I thought you meant height, five foot five. Oh, no.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Well, yes. I mean, maybe she did, but I think the five foot was the height and the five inches was something else.

• 36:19Kate Lister?

  Yeah, okay, I'm with you. Okay.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Which meant that Paris was then really, you know, keyed up to hate her third novel and indeed did. Her third novel was Lilia. And that was regarded as really controversial because it basically said women are completely better off without marriage. And it was quite explicit about attacking the, um, the institutions itself.

• 36:38Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  And she also lost her political allies, the sort of Saint-Simonists, the people who thought they were totally progressive.

• 36:44Kate Lister?

  So that, that was too far, was it? That was the line. Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Equality, but not actually for women, the usual, you know, like the French Revolution itself.

• 36:54Kate Lister?

  That's really interesting though, because we're still having these conversations today, right now, because less and less women are wanting to get married and have children. And there's real discussion, heated debate around this. And here she is in eighteen thirty saying exactly the same thing.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Saying really, it's a tyranny, you know, and living by it. I mean, you know, she is going from relationship to relationship with some overlaps. And she is, she's having the courage to do that. And this is the eighteen thirties. So eighteen thirty three is also when she has the only relationship we know that she had with a woman, who was the leading female actor of her day, called Marie Dorval, who'd been a child prodigy and so on. Only for a few months, only for about three months or so, but they remained friends, which is really good. Maybe they remained friends and they were friends with benefits, who knows? But, you know, it starts intense and then it isn't. And it's Marie Dorval. She boasted to Marie Dorval about Mary May, about the one night stand. It's Marie Dorval who sent that rumor all around Paris.

• 37:53Kate Lister?

  Oh, blabbermouth. Right. Okay.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  So when Georges had another um one night stand with a man while she was seeing Marie, she didn't tell Marie.

• 38:03Kate Lister?

  I bet she didn't. What about Chopin? When does he make an appearance?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  We haven't got there yet, no, because now she has a relationship with the poet Alfred de Mousse, who was then kind of, you know, like a rock star, mad, bad and dangerous. So they were like this premier couple. But he's young again, he's living with his mother.

• 38:21Kate Lister?

  Oh, she does have a type, doesn't she?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  She really has a type, yeah. And even they all look the same, you know. So she takes him to Venice where he gets typhoid and the doctor she calls in to treat him, Pietro Pagello. She has an affair with him. So de Mousse goes back to Paris, but she and de Mousse don't really split up. Well, they're on off, on off for two years till eighteen thirty five. And then he's violent also. A classic domestic abuse, you know, flit.

• 38:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  With the help of a friend and somewhere to go to and um yeah, some money from, an advance from her publisher. So that, so that's eighty three five. Then eighty thirty six, she meets Chopin for the first time. She meets him through Franz Liszt, who's kind of Chopin's frenemy, really, you know, friend but also contemporary but rival. I mean, such, both of them, these kind of celeb pianist composers. Liszt will long outlive Chopin, but very different in their personal style. One, Chopin very kind of, well, effete really, and Polish and delicate and will die of TB. Liszt, very romantic, ironic hair, you know, big pieces of music, big, you know, temperament Hungarian.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Um but, you know, a Polish Hungarian who've come to Paris to make their careers in, you know, the centre of culture. And Liszt and his partner are um friends of um Georges as she is by now. As she's friends with all sorts of people, like the painter Delacroix, these other novelists we've been mentioning. She is, you know, really, really well known. She's at the centre of European culture.

• 40:01Kate Lister?

  In the epicentre of it.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  So she meets Chopin, but, you know, he's with a much younger woman and nothing happens. But in eighteen thirty eight, she decides to set her cap at him in spring. And by the July, they're living together. They'll live together for nine years, nine years, during which she supports him, so he doesn't have to go on concert tours, which he doesn't like doing. Right. And he can compose his masterpieces, which he does do, but you know, it's on her shilling. I mean, obviously he gets paid advances and so on for his work, but it's not enough. Hobo sexual. Yeah, but he is gay. I mean, almost certainly gay. Oh. Because. Retranslated. And he writes really mucky letters to um one friend from his youth in

• 40:44Speaker 03

  particular, you know, saying things like, I had a dirty dream about you last night, you know, so please allow me to kiss you today, or, you know, I'm going to come and see you, but make sure you're clean shaven. Oh, well, really. Exactly. It's not just that kind of nineteenth century effusion and, you know, friends. No. Because they did. No, no, it's. And right from the start, Georges is sort of, because Chopin's best friend in Paris, who's older, who I think isn't a lover or if not a serious lover of his, but is called Wojciech Zimawa, becomes Georges's confidant while she's trying to get together with Chopin, and indeed while she's with Chopin. And she says to him, you know, he seems to disdain in the manner of devout, the human coarseness.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  And she thinks that, you know, he's so refined. And she also in the beginning thinks he's not yet split up from the young woman, though he has. Okay. So it takes her a year really to realise, okay, there's going to be no sex here. During which time, she has taken him to Majorca, she's taken him south for his health because he's obviously already chesty, as it were. And then there's this famous stay in Majorca where they stay on the island, and then the last two months they stay in an idyllic but very cold, Cistercian ruined monastery, a charter house at Val de Mosse, which is what everybody who knows about George Sand knows about George Sand. Oh, she took Chopin to the wet and cold of Majorca. But she didn't. She took him for his health

• 42:11Speaker 03

  because Paris, of course, like London, is a lowland basin and it's full of smogs and so on. Not as industrialised as London at that point, but still. And she's taken him south. And it's just their bad luck that it happens to be an exceptionally rainy, exceptionally cold winter. No, that's not her fault. Yeah. But, you know, it's not her fault. Anyway, it takes him quite a long time to recover. And when they get back to Noam after, she sort of writes a note to herself, you know, that's the end of it. But she keeps him on because she thinks he's a genius.

• 42:52Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Fiona and George after this short break.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Hi there. I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're gonna do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 44:41Kate Lister?

  She kind of collects these little younger genius waif and stray types. That's very interesting. By this point, she's going by George or Georges Sand.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Yes, so she's J. Sand when she co-writes with Jo. And then she becomes G. Sand, but she's still been called Aurora domestically. But by 1832, and that George is Georges, the French George with an S on the end. But by the time she gets together with de Mousse, so this is 1833, she's dropped the S and she's got the English George, Georges Sand.

• 45:19Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  And who knows why, except that Sand is an abbreviation of Sando and George, I guess, is an abbreviation of Georges with an S.

• 45:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Or because the convent she went to was an English order. It was the English Augustin Sisters. So maybe, I don't know why she does it. But maybe she's also raising a flag. It's not quite a man's name.

• 45:40Kate Lister?

  No, but she does do quite a lot of things in her personal appearance and in her life that really, really shocking for the time. Today, probably wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow at all. But like, she would wear trousers. She's going by a man's name. Could you talk to us a little bit about, about that?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd love to. I mean, she starts wearing trousers when she's still a teenager at home in Nohant. And she does it because she learns to ride not side saddle as the convent would be for a lady, but as she calls it in the English style. So whatever you call, whatever the opposite of side saddle is, cross saddle. I don't know what you call it, not being a horsewoman. And she's taught by Epolit, her half-brother. So, and she goes through these long gallops and she, there's a practicality about wearing boy's clothes. And it really reminds me, we're talking about having thought about other women. It really reminds me of Elizabeth Bath Browning, who until she fell ill was a tomboy and didn't want to be a girl because she hated the word feminine because she thought it was everything to do with constriction and having to be weakling. And she wanted freedom and agency.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  And Georges does something really similar. She talks about being a garçon. She's a boy. She likes the idea of the boy. Obviously, she likes the idea of the boy sexually too. But she likes the idea of boyhood seems to do, have to do with freedom. So we've already remarked that she's immensely heterosexual. I mean, she's extremely, there is no question. These are not allowances conveners. She clearly really has a type that she falls for. But when she comes to Paris and owning her private life with, for example, de Maizet, she wears frocks. Okay. She's frocked up, she's normal. And when she's living in Noor, and when for her whole, sort of from, you know, her thirties onwards, she wears frocks.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  But when she's young and making her reputation in Paris, she goes out and about and she wears a man's attire. Right. Not only the trousers, but she wears, you know, she looks quite, she looks very smart and, you know, tailored in contemporary images. But there are two things I think going on. One is there were young women who did do that, particularly who wore male riding coats, which were then fashionable. Which are really big, long ones, actually designed for sentry duty. Because they allowed you to go out and about in Paris and not get hassled. Yeah, yeah. You know, you could go to places where women weren't supposed to go, like you could go to the cheap seats in the gods, in the opera and so on, which women weren't allowed to do. You could go unescorted, so that.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  In fact, so much so that, you know, twenty years before she got to Paris, there was a Parisian bylaw enacted forbidding women to cross dress. Because it was regarded as becoming too much of a thing. There's lots of women actually doing this. There are lots of women actually, but she's a famous one. She's already successful. So what can we take her down for? Right. But the other thing that I think is going on, I think that is for me really interesting. And you see it in the images of her. And one of the things I wanted to do, that's why, you know, it's called Becoming Georges, the book and the invention of Georges Hahn. I wanted to see how this image became stark, this reputation, but also how she became who she became. And I'm really interested in how.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  It is one thing to swim against the tide and actually get to do your work, particularly as the tide of the early 90th century. But it's another thing too. What does it look like to be authoritative if you're a woman?

• 48:59Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  And that is something we don't have images of. We have lots of images of incredibly gifted, even today, we have lots of images of incredibly gifted young women, first novels, you know, debuts, debutantes, you know. And fantastic, that's an advance. But, you know, it's the whole debate, isn't it, about female newsreaders get cut off at the knees at sort of 50 or whatever. Whereas men goes, we don't have an image of female authority. So what would female authority look like? And Georges' answer seems to be, and you see it particularly in the late great portraits. Well, you see it in Delacroix doing a portrait of her. And then you see it in the 1830s. And then you see it in the late great photos by the great photographer Felix Nada of her. That she is dressed as a man, but isn't pretending to be a man.

• 49:45Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  So she's not, it's not transvestism in that whole identity sexual way. It's what does a woman like when she wears the costume of authority?

• 49:57Kate Lister?

  Looks like a man.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  What does a woman like when she's wearing the uniform of being a writer, which is a young woman, which is a boy's uniform? And what does she look like when she's wearing the uniform of being a master? Which of course, in the last more than a decade of her life, she became friendly with Flaubert, much younger novelist whom she advocated and who calls her dear master, master the masculine form. They're using dear in the feminine form. So she's really, she's really queering stuff up. But it isn't about desire. And I think that's mega interesting because it's so relevant to everyone everywhere.

• 50:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I can understand, obviously, you know, like queer history and trans history is so important. But you can also, like trying to unpick it. But you can also understand how somebody that like maybe wasn't trans and well, slightly queer, she seems to be. But they would actually resent being a woman just because that was so limiting in so many ways. And what they're trying to do is like adopt the freedom and the authority that was given very freely to men.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. I don't think it's in her case about essentialism. I think it's about the freedom and authority of men. And I think probably for straight cis women. Which she may or may not have been, well, obviously she was cis. That is really interesting because I think it's quite important. We don't only think about trans and queer history, although those, as you say, those incredibly important, incredibly important to recoup those, particularly because by their nature, well, by the nature of society, they were buried for so long. But I think it's really important we keep talking about the construction of womanhood and the construction of femininity. Because that's about agency in a different way.

• 51:42Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Not only our responsibility as witnesses to the past, but our responsibility to, well, as witnesses to a different constituency in the past. What does female authority look like?

• 51:53Kate Lister?

  So what happens to Georges Sanden, this woman that's running around having affairs left, right and centre, collecting little waifs and strays, um, quite into young men, numerous affairs, a huge colossal literary genius, wearing trousers and smoking cigars. What happens to her?

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Well, she doesn't have a bad life by 1970 standards. That's to say she doesn't die at 40 or anything. She lives on until 1876, which is pretty good going. So she's 72 when she dies of bowel cancer, horrible death, but you know. But she, she publishes 70 novels, huge success with plays in the Paris equivalent of the West End. She writes travel books, she writes an autobiography in sort of 1854. She founds progressive newspapers, three. She has pamphleteer in 1848 for progressive politics, advocates for clemency for people who've been imprisoned as a result. She defends the case of Franchet. Franchet was a, a young woman with learning difficulties who um was thrown out by

• 52:57Speaker 03

  the nuns in La Chartre, in the convent. And, you know, was discovered weeks later and obviously been, you know, abused, pregnant and, you know, just absolutely kind of disgusting. And uh Georges not only wrote about that, but um raised money for her and so on. So there's a shift into ecological writing. She writes three really influential, and they were on the school curriculum in France until quite recently. I think in some places they still are. Novels about the life of poor people in the countryside. So Devil's Pool, this is eighteen forty six to eight, so coming up eighteen forty eight. Devil's Pool, La Petite Fedette and François Lachampin.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  La Petite Fedette is so fundamental to the culture that that's the novel that Proust's mother is reading to him in Alarachar. It's La Petite Fedette. And then the great loop back isn't just the Madeleine, but in the very, towards the end of the very last volume, he discovers an edition in a friend's library, takes it down and that's the time regained. The telescoping isn't just the Madeleine, it's La Petite Fedette. And she's writing, so this is before Thomas Hardy, and she's writing about the lives of ordinary people, rural people. So she's moved her attention away from the lives of women, it's the lives of poor people in the countryside. So she writes about that with respect and understanding and not romanticising. It's not pastoral, it's something very different, it's political in a different way.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  And then she also starts ecological writing. She writes these astonishing sets of essays, talking about understanding that the natural world is, is an ecosystem, that it shouldn't use that word, obviously yet, but you know, it's connected to itself and sort of independent of us, but that we can impact it and we do impact it. So she's, she has this kind of vision of the world as ecological and she has had that all her life, because when even she was a child, she invented this kind of green man, locust day, day kind of deity who is sexless, genderless, who's called Coran Bay. So there's all of this work going on and she calms down. She's, something about the life with Chopin slows her down.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  And although she does have affairs and then she has this really good relationship for fifteen years towards the end of her life, he dies first because he has TB as well. She and her son, Maurice, known for the marshal, are settled in Nohant, where she builds a marionette stage for him because he becomes a really distinguished marionetist and also an epidopterist and an illustrator. So he's very gifted. Of course, he can't become as famous as her, but he's also very protective of her. He's a really loyal son, he becomes a kind of keeper of the flame. She also builds a sort of incubator stage for trying out her plays, which then go and have success in the West End. So she settles in, she becomes known as La Bon Dame Nohant, so for her good works in the locality. So she becomes.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  You know, she settles into a kind of matronhood. And, you know, it's it's gendered, it's feminine, she wears dresses, she's doing traditional things, taking herbal remedies around to cottages and so on. And she's, you know, universally held in terrific esteem as this kind of literary cultural monument. And there's a train line is built, so people come down from Paris a lot to visit. And she has the reward at the very least of the culture understanding. What a great writer she is. She has the reward of having a loving son who marries quite late. He doesn't marry till he's thirty nine. He marries the daughter of a family friend, an artist, calamata.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  So he and Lena have a son who dies, but then two daughters who live. And the one of them, the younger one, Auror, lives until nineteen sixty one.

• 56:42Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Lives on at Nohant, keeping it, as it were, as a museum, but also manages to get the French state to take it on and turn it into a museum. So this kind of tremendous continuity of Sand right down to nineteen sixty one.

• 56:56Kate Lister?

  It really is.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  And she's said to really resemble her grandmother too. And so there's a almost in touching distance, but of course not.

• 57:04Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, just to take it right back to what we're saying at the beginning. Why do you think women like Georges Sand aren't able to retain that fame in the way that that great male writers are able to? Because she's not the only one, but she's a really dramatic example of it. Why do you think that's the case?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  I think it's attritional work by male critics. I think almost, I don't know, because one can hardly bear it to be true, but I think that unconsciously.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Even the nicest literary men see themselves in the other with another man and they just don't take women seriously profoundly profoundly still and you know I in a way I don't know where to put that because it it's so hard to sort of bear in a way but they still I mean we're still we're still at the de bovart stage that you know men are the norm and we are othered I mean it's just extraordinary and although there's you know things are so much better than they were at least in Britain than they were you know a generation ago as we've seen in North America

• 58:22Speaker 03

  slip back very quickly look at Afghanistan and it's just profoundly still there I mean a personal anecdote I'm not obviously pretending I'm George Sand but I am by now quite a serious biographer of major romantic figures not romantic figures who let's try and find something in their diaries and you know to try and say oh well they could have been a writer if they these are women who who dared and did you know who had this huge achievement and against the grain of circumstance so it's like double the achievement to the men and yet you know a couple of literary men I can think of who are I would have thought friends to whom each of them because it happened you know I

• 59:04Speaker 03

  saw them I gave an advance copy of the book each of them is nattering on about other books they're going to read it doesn't occur to them to read my book and I do think you know when you look at the reception of I'm sorry to say but someone like Richard Holmes who is a wonderful biographer romanticist and so on but when you look at a female biographer the kind of notion is I'm just a transparent lens and you know somehow the story of George Sand wrote itself there was no research there was no storytelling there's no way that the material is organized you know no just somehow guileless Fiona you know and George sprung fully formed from the keyboard in the same way as to come back to Mary Shelley this constant talk even when people acknowledge she wrote the

• 59:48Speaker 03

  novel kind of oh well what in her surroundings could have made her write it you know as if the fact that there was stuff in popular science and the fact that her partner was friends with Byron somehow then made Frankenstein's spring from her pen no she did the work she did it she made it and it's just it's heartbreaking it's very

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Very hard. I mean, it's very clear with some writers, you can see Elizabeth Batbrowning, you can see the moment, the turning point is Harold Bloom. You can see the moment at which he's dismissing her and saying, unfortunately, she was an impediment in the life of, as he says, the greatest poet of her age, which was Robert Browning. And he says she could, it's very ad feminine. Oh, she got in the way. She wanted to dress her child up as a girl. I mean, lies, but you know, attritionally, if that is a narrative over and over and over, these are the men. I mean, also, you know, when I was still an undergraduate, another shot was much better now. You could do Ordon and Elliot. This is the most modern the curriculum became. Or you could do Tennyson and Browning.

• 1:00:53Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  There was no question it would be Elizabeth Batbrowning. And I, yeah.

• 1:00:59Kate Lister?

  Just systematically.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  And that is why I have to believe that our attritional, it's more attritional in your case, because you have great reach and so on. But, you know, the attritional, keeping naming the names brings them back.

• 1:01:11Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Or, you know, at least counterbalances that.

• 1:01:15Kate Lister?

  Fiona, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much for coming to tell us about this incredible woman. If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  I have a website and I'm in Wikipedia and I'm in Who's Who. So Google me.

• 1:01:30Kate Lister?

  Google her. Thank you so much.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  And, oh, here's, let me hold out the book.

• 1:01:34Kate Lister?

  Let's, here we go. Becoming George. It's a fabulous, fabulous read. Go and get it. Thank you so much. You've been marvelous.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you, Kate, for everything.

• 1:01:49Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Fiona for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up this month, I am excited to be heading to the golden age of Hollywood and all the scandal that came with it. And if you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.