George Sands: True genius, true woman

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman is a scrupulously researched and tenderly revealing biography of one of the great pioneering figures of 19th-century French literature. Born in 1804—at a time when women were deprived of their civil rights (along with minors, criminals, and the insane)—Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin grew up to defy those norms, both in her life and her writing. Adopting the gender-neutral pen name George Sand, and in a career lasting over forty years as a novelist and playwright, she is best remembered today for the affairs and friendships she enjoyed with men: the composer Chopin; the painter Delacroix; the novelist Balzac.

But this moving biographical portrait, written by award-winner Séverine Vidal and illustrated by Kim Consigny, restores her to the center stage she always commanded in her lifetime. Not just as the daring, scandalously cross-dressing, bisexual, cigarette-smoking divorcée novelist, but as the brilliant chronicler of her changing time—and therefore of ours.