Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand (Transworld) by Fiona Sampson
The title of poet and scholar Fiona Sampson’s latest biography denotes several journeys in the life of one of France’s first great women writers, George Sand. Starting with her childhood in rural Nohant in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it follows her to Paris where she takes part in some of the upheavals that followed, taking in her advocacy for women’s rights and against marriage, her self-discovery as a writer, her turbulent relationships with Alfred de Musset and Fryderyk Chopin, the public scandals caused in part by her adoption of masculine clothing, and by her use of a male nom de plume. To become George Sand, writes Sampson in her introduction to a writer no longer as widely read in the UK as many of her male contemporaries, required “will, imagination, chutzpah”.
Charting Sand’s life through the development of mass politics and rapid urbanisation, Sampson bookmarks significant shifts in Sand’s life by spending a few pages between each chapter analysing an image of her subject. As Sand lived from 1804 to 1876, and moved throughout her life in bourgeois circles, she was often captured not just by portrait painters, but also by photographers.
The first “impression” provides circularity, as it catches Sand with her granddaughters, just a year before her death, at the country house where she grew up. This allows Sampson to explore just how much France changed during Sand’s lifetime, positing Sand as a “bridge figure”. In the 18th century, writes Sampson, the likes of Bach, Goethe, Rousseau or Voltaire could shift European culture while working outside their capital cities, whereas Sand had to go to Paris to mix in literary and musical circles, at least for the prime years of her astonishingly productive career.
Sampson spends her first four chapters on Sand’s childhood as Aurore Dupin, establishing the formative nature of her parents’ cross-class relationship, her father’s early death after being thrown from his horse, her being raised largely by her grandmother, and the importance of Nohant as a location throughout her life.
Inevitably, the pace picks up once we move to Paris in 1831, when Sand chose her famous pseudonym – and successfully applied for a permit to wear men’s clothing in public, which was issued by the police at the time. (This permission did not stop newspapers or literary journals from making unkind comments about her lack of femininity, even if the concept of “transgender” was a century from existence, and friends as prominent as Victor Hugo said the matter of whether Sand was “my sister or my brother” did not concern him.)
Sampson, writing in an age of frenzied discussion about gender identity, wisely does not spend much time on the question of whether Sand was a proto-trans pioneer. Assessing Paul Gavarni’s drawing of Sand in male attire, produced for a gossip column in 1831 or 1832, Sampson quotes a letter from 1835 in which Sand writes, “I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which [men] alone believe [they] have the right to enjoy.” It was men’s privileges that Sand wanted, according to Sampson, not a male identity – at a time before the law, and sexologists, defined “the homosexual” or “the transvestite” as types.
Becoming George is at its most interesting when asking what it means to be an author – and what it means to write a biography. “Most of the ceaselessly branching alternatives and decisions that make up a life evade reconstruction,” writes Sampson at the beginning of chapter five, “Becoming a writer”. When discussing authors, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that the thing important writers spend most of their days doing – writing – does not have the same kind of technical interaction with a medium as painting or music, and tends to be solitary. But Sand was more sociable than many, and had complicated, cross-country affairs with famous composers and poets that gave plenty of material to future biographers and writers. (Notably, the German Expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser’s 1922 play Flight to Venice imagined Sand’s relationship with fellow writer de Musset as a shared quest for artistic renewal.)
Sampson explores perennial questions for creative women, asking how Sand dealt with sexism, with men telling her “Don’t make books, make children”; the difficulty of pursuing a career while raising a family, with Sand prioritising her work, and her relationship with her daughter suffering as a result; and how her relationship with Chopin had to end because it was suffocating her ability to write. It’s full of insight that could only be reached by a biographer’s shared experience: “The most difficult step in becoming a published writer isn’t what you do with the blank page [but] what you do with the filled one,” writes Sampson, reflecting on how a person’s mid-twenties can be “when time passing begins to measure not progress but the stalling of some original trajectory”. This anxiety drives Sand to a phenomenal output – 70 novels and more than 50 other published works.
Naturally, an oeuvre so large is somewhat uneven, and Sampson charts the economic, social and political pressures for Sand to be so prolific, even if not every text can be analysed in detail in her 350 pages. Though Sampson occasionally overplays contemporary parallels (in lines such as “enjoying the kind of good life often featured in twenty-first-century lifestyle magazines”), this is a highly readable, subtly inventive book that argues for Sand’s importance not just as a writer but as a cultural figure.
Sampson closes with famous Paris photographer Félix Nadar’s portrait of Sand dressed as the satirical playwright Molière, which is “not of a man or woman, nor even of a woman dressed as a man, but of literary authority itself”. It reminds us that Sand is synonymous with the 19th century, France and the extraordinary written culture of that time and place – and that this remains the most important context within which to judge Sand’s life and work.
This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.
