Photo by Ekaterina Voskresenskaya
Fiona Sampson is the author of the new biography Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand. Her other books include In Search of Mary Shelley. She is also a poet, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives i the UK.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the French writer George Sand (1804-1876)?
A: Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand is the third in my trilogy of literary biographies of Romantic women writers. My first subject was Mary Shelley, and my second the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Like both of these, George Sand is a figure of enormous cultural resonance, prodigiously successful and productive in her own lifetime, whose posthumous literary reputation has been partly shunted aside by cultural gossip about her private life.
Mary Shelley is famous as the author of Frankenstein. But even in 2018, when I wrote In Search of Mary Shelley for the bicentenary of the first publication of Frankenstein, there was still an idea around that somehow she might have had the idea for the story, but it was her poet-husband Percy Bysshe who “really” wrote it.
Despite the fact that the evidence of her authorship, in the form of the Frankenstein notebooks, is in the public domain at the British Library in London – and digitised and available to the whole world in facsimile.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is well known in Britain for a sonnet that’s often voted “the nation's favourite poem,” one of her Sonnets from the Portuguese which starts, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” She’s remembered in the North American canon for her great verse novel Aurore Leigh, the first woman's bildungsroman.
But by the time I published Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (W.W. Norton 2021) she had been traduced by 20th century (male) literary critics, particularly Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, as a mere auxiliary and indeed impediment to “the greatest poet of the age,” her husband Robert Browning. In fact she was his senior in poetics, and the techniques he made his own were developed by her.
Similarly, George Sand was the author of 70 novels, autobiography, travel writing, ecological essays, feminist tracts, politically progressive pamphlets, and tremendously successful plays. She founded periodicals; she was active in support of vulnerable members of society.
Yet all of this is forgotten and has been overshadowed by her relationship with the pianist Fryderyck Chopin. Or by the idea that she was just a crossdressing, cigar-smoking, transgressive figure about town.
Yet there’s no male writer among her contemporaries who would have been dismissed as unimportant just because he had a bohemian private life. They all did!
I wanted once again, as with Shelley and Barrett Browning, to do entirely original research in the primary source (the archives, for example) in order to get back to what is and isn’t true – and build up my portrait that way, rather than by repeating rumour and gossip.
Q: How were the book’s title and subtitle chosen, and what role do you see invention playing in Sand’s life?
A: We chose the title Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand for the double meaning in “The invention of –.”
George Sand had an extraordinarily prolific imagination. She wrote her 70 novels and many plays, as well as her nonfiction, at speed and often at night: having worked the double shift of looking after her partner and tutoring her children.
She wrote in order to make money to live; in other words, she wrote at speed for professional as well as personal reasons. But, as well as being able to imagine other people, classes, and situations with emotional immediacy in these stories, she was someone whose whole life was a process of self-invention.
For any woman born at the beginning of the 19th century to choose to become a writer was a radical act. There could be no sleepwalking into it. Besides, she came from a strange class background, half aristocratic at the same time that her mother had been a child prostitute. Which meant that she would always have needed to find and define a place herself in society.
Sand was also interested in the invention of that society. A true daughter of revolutionary France, she was still on the progressive side in 1848. She was a feminist and an early ecologist.
Then there was the question of how she could be a writer, and the extent to which she adopted the uniform and the behaviours of contemporaries who were writers – that's to say the men who were contemporary writers – in order to do so.
Finally, there's the extent to which George Sand was invented by her peers. She was immensely successful and notorious right from her debut novel, Indiana, and her reputation has been worked and reworked ever since.
She is in a sense her own invention – but also someone every generation including our own invents and reinvents. It’s a very modern model of celebrity.
Q: A review of the book in The Times, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, says, “Sand would probably have appreciated Sampson’s sympathetic assessment of the challenges faced by female writers in a period where ‘Égalité’ was a revolutionary principle that was far more often discussed than put into practice.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I was really grateful to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for that thoughtful review, and for making the book the London Times newspaper’s Book of the Week.
And I think he's absolutely right about the way Sand represents the unequal life chances of women, and especially women writers and artists, in the early 19th century – as indeed today. I couldn't have put it better myself!
Social media often picks up on the extent to which, as my mother's generation would put it, “fine words butter no parsnips.” For example, interrogating #NotAllMen – I think rightly.
Because, while obviously not all men are predators or even misogynist, all men do benefit from other men’s misogyny, which they need actively to disrupt if they’re going to claim that exemption. This works the same way as white privilege, from which I myself benefit.
And I guess one of my motives for writing about George Sand is that her life “writes large,” so to speak, the experiences of a woman writer today. It's easier to see what's going on when the writing is so large.
Literary history gives us the horrifying misogyny of her peers reducing her writing to the most crude bodily terms: Flaubert saying the mucus oozes between her ideas; Nietzsche (not quite a contemporary) calling her a milk cow; Saint-Simon saying she was a great woman with a prodigious talent and an enormous bottom.
Because Sand and these friends and enemies of hers were all famous we have these sentiments on the record. What’s hidden today, behind the bland lack of interest male critics take in the great Romantic women writers? Something equally grotesque?
For of course nowadays I wonder, as I go around literary – and non-literary – London, which of the men I’m sharing a table with think about me and other women (writers) in just those terms.
Q: What do you see as Sand’s legacy today?
A: It’s a paradox that because Sand was genuinely influential as a writer much of her influence today is almost invisible to us. That is to say it's not invisible in itself, but we just don't know where it comes from.
George Sand was part of the great flowering of realist fiction in the 19th century. She helped the novel form shift from something often epistolary or fragmented and sometimes rudimentary – the fiction of The Sorrows of Young Werther or of Pamela or indeed even Frankenstein with its narrator within a narrator within a narrator – to intentionally absorbing storytelling. To which the reader is meant fully to assent, as traditionally we have to theatre.
George Sand was a Romantic in her ideology and in her cultural moment. She was revolutionary and progressive. But she was also part of the movement away from Romanticism's origins in abstract ideas, philosophy, observational science and the radical towards the feelingful, familiar and inhabited.
Among the British novelists she influenced profoundly are the Brontë sisters, who took from her permission to write with explicit emotion, moving beyond the ceremonial comedy of manners of a Jane Austen. She's also the precursor of Thomas Hardy by some decades.
Although she’s known for placing women and children at the centre of stories for the first time, in the 1840s she began to publish what are known as her pastoral novels. These are today part of the French canon and school syllabus.
They're striking because it's the first time that the lives of the rural poor are seen as of equal significance as those of the wealthy, and at the same time these lives are also acknowledged as being difficult, not some picturesque pastoral: shepherdess in ribbons.
Sand also has a very engaging, exclamatory, rapturous, onrushing narrative voice. She writes her novels in a very similar tone to that of her letters. So she makes literature something intimate and personal, rather than formal and stuffy.
Again, in a world of Booktok and book clubs we take this for granted. We forget that it is radically, culturally specific.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a book about Rousseau and the self. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a political philosopher of continuing influence but, like all of us, he was a flawed human being.
I'm fascinated by the mismatch between his political philosophies – which are built on ideas about the nature of the human self – and what his own experience of selfhood was. It does feel like an inverted pyramid, balancing great weight on an unstable tip!
Rousseau is very enjoyable to read, partly because he has the easy French prose of an autodidact and partly because his writing is full of personality, perhaps for the same reasons.
To put it another way, Rousseau’s self, his unmediated and very un-self-aware personality, is in every page of his work. Yet he seems absolutely unaware of this fact.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Can we talk a bit about the book? The “new biography” is an attempt – perhaps not as radical as George Sand’s own reinventions of the novel form! – to marry excellent literary storytelling with scrupulous scholarly primary research.
I like to think I make that hard work invisible everywhere but in the footnotes, but that it means my storytelling is all the fresher. The truth is always funkier and more muscular than repeated and unexamined material – that human equivalent of AI slop.
I’m really interested in psychological biography; in asking how and why someone functioned. I’m equally uninterested in letting myself wander into fiction. Historical fiction is great – but literary biography isn’t the place for it.
What I’m doing feels like a cross between being a detective and a therapist. I’m close-reading every single piece of actual evidence – from the wording of letters, to the almanacs which tell us the weather on a particular day and place in history – for what we can know from it. Or maybe this is like in infinitely complex jigsaw.
I can promise that not a single detail in my biographies is made up, and when I don’t know something I discuss what’s likely and “show my workings-out.” I think of the reader as coming on a quest with me, in which we find out together how an extraordinary figure became herself and emerged.
But this brings us back to my first point, about the invention of the title. George Sand was repeatedly made and made-over by her peers, and between every chapter of my book I have placed an “impression.” Each one takes a contemporary image of her and leads into a micro-essay about how she was being viewed and invented at that moment.
It’s a continuation of the work I did in Two-Way Mirror, in which I “framed” each chapter with a short reflection (the Mirror of the title referred to the poet’s work) on what itself biography does, and what portraiture is.
It’s a profound question, isn’t it, how we shape the people we respond to – and not only the celebrities?
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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