Lélia ou la vie de George Sand was published by Hachette in 1952, taking its title from Sand’s most controversial novel — the 1833 work that scandalized France with its frank treatment of female desire and its implicit rejection of marriage as an institution. Maurois chose the title deliberately: Sand’s Lélia was the declaration of independence that defined her career, just as Ariel had defined Shelley’s ethereal nature in Maurois’s earlier biography.
George Sand’s life was, by any measure, extraordinary. Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin in 1804, she inherited an estate at Nohant in Berry, married Baron Casimir Dudevant at eighteen, left him at twenty-seven to live independently in Paris (wearing men’s clothing for the practical reason that it was cheaper and allowed her to move freely in the city), and embarked on a literary career that would produce over eighty novels, twenty plays, an autobiography, and an enormous correspondence. Her love affairs — with Jules Sandeau (from whose name she derived her pseudonym), Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, and others — were as famous as her books, and the two were intertwined: the affair with Musset produced Elle et Lui, the affair with Chopin sustained a decade of her finest writing.
Maurois is particularly good on the Chopin relationship, which lasted from 1838 to 1847 and was the central emotional fact of Sand’s middle years. He presents it without sentimentality: Sand was the dominant partner, Chopin the dependent one, and the relationship was both nurturing and suffocating. Sand’s decision to end it — partly because of conflicts with Chopin’s circle, partly because she was exhausted by his illness and neediness — has been debated ever since, and Maurois presents both sides fairly.
The biography also takes seriously Sand’s political engagement. During the Revolution of 1848, she was effectively the literary voice of the Republic, writing proclamations, editing newspapers, and lobbying her friend Ledru-Rollin. When the revolution failed, she retreated to Nohant and spent her final decades as the sage of Berry — visited by Flaubert, Turgenev, and younger writers who revered her as the last link to the Romantic era. She died in 1876, mourned by the entire literary world.
Maurois argues that Sand’s reputation suffered in the twentieth century from two related prejudices: the assumption that a woman who wrote so much could not have written well, and the focus on her love life at the expense of her work. His biography attempts to correct both errors, devoting substantial attention to the novels (especially Indiana, Valentine, Consuelo, and the pastoral novels) and arguing that Sand at her best is the equal of Balzac in social observation and superior to him in the depiction of nature and rural life.
Collecting Lélia
First French edition (Hachette, Paris, 1952): Lélia ou la vie de George Sand. Two volumes in the original French.
First English edition (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1953): Lélia: The Life of George Sand. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. One volume.
Market values:
- French first, two volumes: $30–$80
- English first in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$15