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“... in A la recherche du temps perdu – and also the last, one complete, 2500-page orbit later – is George Sand’s François le champi, the first ‘real’ novel the narrator remembers having read. Or rather, remembers having had read to him, by his mother on that seminal evening of anxiety when she fails to come up and give him a goodnight kiss. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years later, Landry, a character in La Petite Fadette, a novel written by Dupin under her pen name George Sand, thinks about drowning himself in the river. By this time Sand’s readers would have been familiar with the suicide option. In her first novel, Indiana (1832), a serving girl drowns herself in a millpond while ...”

“... At the time, George Sand was the celebrity, a retired amorist and noted cross-dresser now publishing without strain two or three novels a year of the improving, marketable kind. Flaubert, too, had had an episode of scandal, when he and Madame Bovary were taken to court in 1857 for obscenity; but he by now was labouring retentively away once again in the service of Apollo, the Olympian specially refurbished by him as ‘the god of crossings-out ...”

“... a glacial Eugène Delacroix; the incredibly joyless Goncourt brothers; a series of portraits of George Sand, who went to Nadar in desperation after a competitor had captured with great vividness her drooping mouth and double chin. The image was ‘making everyone scream’, Sand wrote to Nadar. He went on to take ...”

“... Was George Eliot reticent about sex? During the period in which her reputation was at its lowest, between 1890 and 1940, one element in the general argument that her novels were philosophical treatises rather than art was her supposed coyness in sexual matters.* ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset,’ cried W.E ...”

“... to his unusual capacity for suffering in the service of a transcendent Art. No wonder he told George Sand as he set out on the novel that it would be the modern ‘counterpart’ of Saint Antoine (the final version of which he had just sent off to the publisher). He is reverting in Bouvard et Pécuchet to the role of St Anthony, with the prolonged ...”

“... a strong bond between them. EBB’s confession that she had been covertly reading Victor Hugo and George Sand apparently evoked a sympathetic response, and she impetuously replied by determining to supply the other with the forbidden texts – to make of Miss Mitford ‘an accomplice in act as in desire’. After anonymously ordering a shipment to be ...”

“... in her own estimation, 49 volumes, some of them admittedly slight. She expressed admiration for George Sand, who could finish one novel and begin another in the same half-hour, yet she herself could shoulder the equally impressive task of projecting her image throughout a long and varied life, both on and off stage. Her undoubted beauty helped, yet it ...”

“... he spent time with, even in his palmiest days, were not social butterflies but fellow artists like George Sand and Chopin, and school friends who had become civil servants. Yet his intellectual isolation should not be underestimated. Wilson-Smith’s chapter describing Delacroix’s friendship with Chopin and ...”

“... reference to the – unspecified – merits of reading him in one of Flaubert’s letters to George Sand but this was in 1871, at the height of Flaubert’s hysteria over the Paris Commune). The resurrection of Bastiat has been almost entirely an American affair, long pre-dating his appropriation by the Tea Party. It began as the Cold War got under ...”

“... that Flaubert had a more intimate relationship with his male friends than with all women except George Sand, whom he treated with rare respect. This gives further credence to Sartre’s observation that there was a homoerotic edge to Flaubert’s friendships, although this was true of most of the men in the Goncourt circle, all of whom were given to ...”

“... as a frivolous libertine. At different times, the Edinburgh Review accused him of flippancy and George Sand, whom one wouldn’t have thought so stuffy, expressed the liveliest disapproval of his clowning. But it may be that Stendhal knew, better than George Sand or the Edinburgh Review, what to take seriously ...”

“... Beethoven which bisects the horizon like an Alp. Dumas père, Hugo, a trousered, cigarette-smoking Sand, a spindly Paganini and a tubby Rossini look on in admiration. Of the eight faces, only Marie d’Agoult’s is invisible. She is seen from behind, sitting on the floor, her head resting on the piano, in imminent danger of being hit by the flying ...”