Wanting and Not Getting, Getting and Not Wanting

Rosemary Dinnage

• My Life by George Sand, translated by Dan Hofstadter, by Dan Hofstadter
  Gollancz, 246 pp, £7.95, September 1980, ISBN 0 575 02682 0
• George Sand in her Own Words edited and translated by Joseph Barry
  Quartet, 475 pp, £7.50, November 1980, ISBN 0 7043 2235 8

The 19th century loved George Sand: the Brownings, the Carlyles, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ruskin, Whitman all read her; Arnold preferred her to Dickens; George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were influenced by her; G.H. Lewes in a rash moment called her the most remarkable writer of the century. Henry James, of all people, loved her ‘serene volubility’. It is not likely, he wrote, that posterity will travel with her novels in its trunk, but when they have gone out of fashion and are rediscovered in dusty corners of old libraries, the discoverers will say: ‘What a beautiful mind! What an extraordinary style! Why have we not known more about these things?’ He could not have guessed that in the 1970s the dusty corners of libraries would be almost bare of her books and that her rediscovery would come about, not on account of her ‘charming, improbable romances for initiated persons of the optimistic class’, but of her life and ideas.