Get ready for a very queer history lesson…
BY FIONA SAMPSON, IMAGE BOOK COVER
There are countless ways to be queer. Publishing a biography of the cultural icon that is George Sand, for her 150th anniversary, I’ve noticed again the constellation of queer choices that enabled her mainstream – indeed epoch-defining – accomplishment.
The story starts conventionally enough, with schoolgirl crushes. In January 1818, a 13-year-old girl named Aurore Dupin was sent away to a convent school to learn her manners. Instead, being feisty and imaginative, she threw herself into cloistered life, even dreaming – to family horror – of becoming a nun. Possibly the seeds of her vocation were sown by 20-something Mary-Alicia Spiring, a “pearl” who “shone” in that hothouse atmosphere. As her special friend, Aurore blossomed into the most popular girl in the school, writing and putting on plays.
But by 15, she was back in Indre, where things livened up only when her half-brother Hippolyte visited from the military academy. He took her dancing and taught her to ride not side-saddle but, shockingly, astride, which is hard to do in a skirt. Aurore soon discovered the freedom of wearing boys’ clothes for long cross-country gallops.
A dozen years later, arriving in Paris to seek her literary fortune, she donned men’s clothes again to move as freely around the city. In contemporary portrayals, the young writer looks stylish in a cravat and a cut-away frockcoat. Curls escape below her top hat, and she’s clearly wearing stays: it’s a gloriously mixed message. But not in fact unusual. So many women sought similar freedoms that an 1800 bylaw had made women wearing “men’s” clothes illegal.
Taking a male pen name wasn’t unusual, either, in an era of cultural misogyny. George Sand found hers by altering the name of the lover she came to Paris with, Jules Sandeau. Careful readers would have guessed she was playing with them, however, since the Frenchman’s name is actually Georges.
George put women (and, later, other vulnerable groups) at the centre of her pioneering, progressive fiction. Her monumental output – including 70 novels – was an international sensation from the start. But by the time her 1832 debut, Indiana, appeared, she had already survived early marriage to an abusive alcoholic, motherhood and various unwise affairs.
Emotionally battle-scarred, often lonely, George became notoriously promiscuous in an era when such behaviour was a male prerogative. Jules had set a pattern of younger, financially dependent men, most famously Fryderyk Chopin. The pianist-composer lived with – and off – her for nine years, from 1838-47. In the biography Becoming George, I reveal how she served unwittingly as his beard. In 1833, there was also one passionate affair with a woman, Marie Dorval, a former child star and leading female actor.
But the queerest thing George Sand did was to subvert the norms of mastery. During their friendship, fellow novelist Gustave Flaubert called her “Dear (feminine form: this is French, after all) Master (masculine form)”. Felix Nadar’s famous photograph of her dressed as her own literary hero Molière says much the same. Beyond the trousers, or the frocks she in fact mostly wore, George Sand cross-dressed by assuming the “masculine” role of writer and authority figure. She displayed mastery of her own work and life.
Fiona Sampson’s Becoming George: The Invention Of George Sand, the first biography of Sand this century, is published by Penguin Doubleday on 19 Feb. It completes her critically acclaimed trilogy of biographies of Romantic women which includes Two-Way Mirror, a New York Times Bestseller. ISBN 978-1529924336 £22 hbk. 400pp.
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