Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Sand
-
Standard Name: Sand, George
Birth Name: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin
Married Name: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dudevant
Pseudonym: George Sand
French writer George Sand
(Aurore Dudevant) wrote over one hundred novels and plays. Her correspondence fills twenty-five volumes. She averaged two novels a year after 1831. British writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and George Eliot
were strongly influenced by her writing, and her notorious life became one of the benchmarks by which women writers were judged.
Jordan, Ruth. George Sand: A Biographical Portrait. Taplinger.
EW
was accustomed from childhood to European travel and even to living in Europe for years at a time. She and her husband spent something like half of every year abroad.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
From February to April...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
Isabel Bretherton is a beautiful but untaught actress from the colonies (born of a Scots father and Italian mother). She falls in love with an Oxford
scholar, Eustace Kendal. but is deeply wounded by his...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, p. vii - xviii.
vii
Critic John Sutherland deems it the best-selling work of quality fiction in the nineteenth century. By the summer...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Augusta Ward
The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan
, William Lovett
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Augusta Ward
MAW
's father, Thomas Arnold
, was the second son and namesake of the eminent Victorian headmaster Thomas Arnold. Matthew Arnold
was his elder brother.
When ST
's parents and Leslie Stephen
tried to nurture a childhood friendship between Susan, Vanessa
(later Bell), and Virginia
(later Woolf), the relationship never took root. As an adult, however (having admired Woolf's early...
Intertextuality and Influence
Susan Tweedsmuir
The opening proper of this volume invokes with some trepidation George Sand
's statement that there is nothing more tedious than the dregs of an old régime.
Tweedsmuir, Susan. A Winter Bouquet. G. Duckworth.
20
Again the structure of the book is...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Frances Trollope
FT
's political conservatism affected her judgements of literature as well as politics. She forcefully expresses her dislike for republicanism, denounces freedom of the press as the most awful engine that Providence has permitted the...
Violence
Flora Tristan
Chazal shot her from behind in the left side at point-blank range. After shooting her, he gave the pistol to a witness and surrendered. FT
was carried back to her apartment and surgeons called. Although...
Reception
Flora Tristan
Some personal comments in the book had lasting repercussions. In her opening chapter, FT
criticizes French writer George Sand
for writing under a male pseudonym and for softening her social critique of women's position by...
Family and Intimate relationships
Mary Taylor
MT
's father, Joshua Taylor
, came from a wool-trading family based in the West Riding of Yorkshire; he often travelled to the Continent on business and was fluent in French and Italian. He...
Material Conditions of Writing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
HBS
used her earlier travels in Europe as material for a travel guide for Americans. She had met Germaine de Staël
and Elizabeth Gaskell
while in Europe, and had voraciously read everything by George Sand
Education
Edith J. Simcox
Soundly educated, EJS
acquired a good knowledge of French and German at school, where she considered herself outrageously defiant and disobedient.
McKenzie, Keith Alexander, and Gordon S. Haight. Edith Simcox and George Eliot. Oxford University Press.
6
She belonged emphatically to George Sand
's class of diables and was generally...
Textual Features
Mary Seacole
Her passing remarks on gender are also of interest. Her descriptions of notables who came through Cruces in Panama include an account of opera singer Catherine Hayes
, and a vivid portrait of dancer and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michèle Roberts
The title story uses mud or muddy almost thirty times. MR
writes, as always, as a feminist; these stories occupy a borderline between the self-making of women and their appropriation into patriarchal stories. She enjoys...
Timeline
11 December 1859: Frenchwoman Angélina Lemoine was acquitted...
Building item
11 December 1859
Frenchwoman Angélina Lemoine
was acquitted of the murder of her newborn infant.
April 1860: As Owen Meredith, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton...
