![\"George](\"http:\/\/worth.id.au\/wish\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/george_sand-3.png?w=224\")
<\/a>In 1831, she began mixing in artistic circles and changed her name to George Sand.<\/p>\n
To be independent, George had to earn her living.\u00a0 She took to writing, lived in attics, cropped her hair, abandoned her expensive layers of women\u2019s drapery and donned cheaper clothing:\u00a0 a redingote, trousers, vest and tie.<\/p>\n
Dressing in men\u2019s clothes allowed her to visit clubs and theatre-pits where she closely observed men in their public male spaces and listened in on their literary and cultural conversations.<\/p>\n
And dressing in men\u2019s clothes brought her valuable attention as a new author.\u00a0 It helped her books to sell so she and her two children could eat.<\/p>\n In her writing career she considered herself an equal among her male peers, and her works were widely read.<\/p>\n By the end of the nineteenth century, her works were out of fashion.<\/p>\n Some of her best writings have been translated into English in recent years.\u00a0 After I read her Gothic novel, Spiridion<\/em>, (in French), about 3 years and 3 months ago, I had an idea that English-language readers would find it intriguing.\u00a0 When I’d finished reading it, I started translating it.\u00a0 Now SUNY Press is publishing my translation of Spiridion<\/i><\/a>, and will have it ready in May 2015.<\/p>\n George wrote it in 1838\/39 while keeping company with Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin, several years her junior.\u00a0 When Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric, George and her children sojourned in Majorca for the winter of 1838, she finished Spiridion<\/em> to the sounds of Chopin composing his Preludes. But in 1842 George revised the novel’s ending, and it’s this one you’ll read in the English translation.<\/p>\n In Spiridion<\/i> the audacious George wrote of an exclusively male microcosm where not one female plays a part, a world impossible for her to experience but not impossible to imagine:\u00a0 a monastery where goodness is punished, corruption is encouraged, love is discouraged, and real and unreal demons haunt the cloisters and the crypt.<\/p>\n It was a harsh critique of the rigid dogmas of a monastery and its authorities.\u00a0 “I allowed myself to challenge purely human institutions,” she said, and, for that, some declared her to be “without principles.”\u00a0 Her response:\u00a0 “Should it bother me?”.<\/p>\n Some readers will learn a lesson and find hope in this story.\u00a0 Others will read a mystery based on the evil tendencies of humans confined in an institution, with a positive suggestion or two for living peaceably with our fellow monks.<\/p>\n In May next year, if you’re looking for a Gothic novel with a philosophical turn, keep your eye out for this cover.<\/p>\n George became one of the rare women of the nineteenth century able to earn enough to be financially independent.\u00a0 She was still writing when she died at 71.<\/p>\n \u00a0*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She was a great-great granddaughter of the King of Poland, Augustus II the Strong.\u00a0 Her father was the king’s great-grandson, Maurice Dupin. Her mother, Sophie Delaborde, the daughter of a bird fancier, was, said George, of the ‘vagabond race of Bohemians’. She was a girl with a foot in two worlds, born Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin in … <\/p>\n![\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/e\/ef\/Liszt_at_the_Piano.JPG\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/e\/ef\/Liszt_at_the_Piano.JPG\")
\n<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/spiridion-cover.jpg\")
![\"Nadar](\"http:\/\/worth.id.au\/wish\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/george-sand_nadar_1861-69.jpg?w=226\")