George Sand

Aurore Dupin before George Sand

She was born in Paris on 1 July 1804, the daughter of an army officer descended, through an illegitimate line, from a king of Poland, and of a Paris bird-seller's daughter — a marriage far across the class line, which left her with grand relations on one side and poor ones on the other and an early, permanent scepticism about which of them was worth more. Her father died in 1808, shortly after bringing the family to Nohant, the house in the Berry region south of the Loire that his mother had bought in 1793 with its two hundred and thirty hectares of land. The child was four, and she was effectively taken over by that grandmother, Marie-Aurore de Saxe, and given the run of the countryside.

Her grandmother died in 1821 and left her Nohant outright, aged seventeen. The following year she married Casimir Dudevant, a retired officer's son, and became the Baronne Dudevant; two children followed, Maurice and Solange. The marriage was a failure of the ordinary kind — he ran the estate, she read — and by 1831 she had negotiated a separation arrangement that let her spend half of each year in Paris on an allowance from her own property.

Paris, 1831: the coat and the name

She arrived in Paris in January 1831, twenty-six years old, sharing rooms and money with Jules Sandeau, a law student from her part of the country who was also trying to write. She wrote for Le Figaro, then a small satirical daily, under its editor Henri de Latouche, and turned out the sketches and reviews that were the entry-level work of Paris journalism. She was poor in a way that mattered: a fashionable dress cost more than she had, and it wore out on the pavement in a week.

So she bought a man's outfit — a long grey overcoat of the kind students wore, trousers, waistcoat, a hat and boots with iron-tipped heels — and described the boots afterwards with real joy, because in them she could go anywhere in any weather. She could also go where the clothes let her go. The cheap standing pits of the Paris theatres were effectively closed to respectable women; so were cafés, and the streets after dark, unescorted. Dressed as a young man she went to all of them, and reviewed what she saw. Paris municipal law had in fact required women to apply to the police for permission to dress as men since 1800, a rule aimed at working women; the permits existed, the ordinance was largely unenforced against the well-connected, and Sand's costume was an open secret rather than a disguise.

The name came out of the journalism. She and Jules Sandeau published a novel together, Rose et Blanche, in 1831 under the joint signature "J. Sand". When she wrote the next one alone, Latouche's advice was to keep the surname the public now knew and change the rest — so "J. Sand" became "G. Sand", and then George Sand, spelled the English way without the final s. The novel was Indiana, published in 1832: the story of a young Creole wife — a Frenchwoman born in the colonies — suffocating in a marriage to a much older man. It sold, it was argued about, and it settled the question of whether she could earn a living.

The trousers and the pseudonym have followed her ever since, usually as an anecdote about eccentricity. They were closer to professional equipment. A woman who intended to report on Paris needed to get into Paris, and to sign work that would be read on its merits before anybody knew who wrote it.

Musset, Venice, and the writing life

In 1833 she began a much-publicised affair with Alfred de Musset, a poet six years younger and the celebrated young star of French Romanticism — the movement of the 1820s and 1830s that put feeling, extremity and the self at the centre of literature. They went to Italy together that winter; in Venice Musset fell seriously ill, Sand nursed him with the help of a young Venetian doctor named Pietro Pagello, and then left Venice with Pagello. The affair ended in 1835 in mutual literary revenge — each of them wrote it up, and Sand's version, Elle et lui ('She and He'), appeared long afterwards in 1859. What is easy to lose in the gossip is that she was writing constantly through it: Lélia, her strangest and most scandalous book, appeared in 1833 and got her denounced from pulpits.

In 1836 she obtained a legal separation from Casimir Dudevant and recovered Nohant. From then on her life had a fixed rhythm: Paris in winter for the theatres, the publishers and the politics; Nohant in summer for the work. Her output was enormous and various — the socially argumentative novels of the 1830s and 1840s, the country novels that made her name in schools (La Mare au diable, 'The Devil's Pool', 1846, and François le Champi, 'François the Waif', 1848), plays, and the twenty volumes of Histoire de ma vie, her autobiography, published from 1854.

The nine winters with Chopin

She met Frédéric Chopin in 1838. He was a Polish composer and pianist who had settled in Paris after the failed rising against Russian rule in his own country, made his living teaching the daughters of the rich, and was already ill with the tuberculosis that killed him. The Centre des monuments nationaux, which runs her house at Nohant, describes him plainly as "son compagnon durant neuf ans" — her companion for nine years.

The first winter went badly: they took her children to the Spanish island of Majorca for Chopin's health, found no proper lodging, ended up in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa, and came back in the spring with him much worse. After that the pattern held for most of a decade — Paris in winter, where they lived in adjoining apartments and he taught and gave the small private concerts he preferred to the concert hall, and Nohant in summer, where he had a piano and quiet and she wrote at night. A great deal of Chopin's mature music was written in her house in the Berry.

It ended in 1847 in a family quarrel over her daughter Solange's marriage, with Chopin taking Solange's side. They met once more, briefly, by accident in Paris. He died in 1849 at thirty-nine and is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery; Sand did not attend the funeral. Nohant is the reason the two names stay attached: the Centre des monuments nationaux lists Chopin first among the guests the house received, alongside the composer Franz Liszt, the novelist Honoré de Balzac, the painter Eugène Delacroix, the singer Pauline Viardot, the writer Théophile Gautier and the novelist Gustave Flaubert.

1848, Nohant, and after

In February 1848 the July Monarchy — the constitutional kingship of Louis-Philippe, in power since 1830 — was overthrown in three days of street fighting in Paris, and France became a republic again. Sand, a convinced republican who had been writing about the rural poor for fifteen years, went straight to Paris and made herself useful to the provisional government — writing propaganda, including several of the official Bulletins de la République that the new government posted and circulated, and founding a short-lived paper of her own. It is the one period of her life spent openly inside politics. It lasted about four months: in June the workers of Paris rose in revolt and were crushed, the republic turned right, and she withdrew to Nohant.

The last quarter-century was Nohant work: novels, a stream of letters, and the private theatre and puppet theatre she and her son Maurice built in the house, for which he carved and she sewed the costumes. She kept writing to the end and died at Nohant on 8 June 1876, aged seventy-one, and is buried in the family cemetery in the grounds. Gustave Flaubert, who had become her closest correspondent and called her his dear master, wept at the funeral.

In Paris, the fullest place to meet her is the Musée de la Vie romantique — the Museum of Romantic Life — at 16 rue Chaptal in the 9th arrondissement, one of the numbered districts Paris is divided into. It is the house and garden of the painter Ary Scheffer, who held a salon there in her lifetime — a regular gathering of writers and artists — and it now holds a collection of Sand portraits, furniture, jewellery and mementoes. Her house at Nohant is a national monument, open to visitors, with the garden, the theatres and the little cemetery still there.