The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-08-10
XIX. GEORGE SAND.

The most fertile story-teller of all
women that ever let their imagination
trot as they held the pen is surely
George Sand. who. by birth. was Lucille
Aurore Dupin, and by marriage Nine
Dudevant, though best known by the
name she chose and made famous
everywhere. Yet her influence has been
wider. much deeper and far more con-
slant than her literary popularity. She
and her novels have been a factor in
every changed relation of women to
men during the last two generations
II is the simple truth to say that there
is no woman today in France, England
or America whose life she has not in
some degree affected. And her infiu-
ence has been steadily tonic, not. of
course. in each phase of it taken by
Itself, but as a whole. In her art, as
in her life, she sco:ned sometimes the
restraints of social conventions. but
she came through struggle to self-con-
.-'aI at last
All sorts of blood mingled in her in
rant veins. on the fathers side were
old and wealthy merchants, officials of
the civil service. famous general. an
adventurous countess and a distant
strain of royalty. Her mother, on the
other hand, was a dressmakeN daugh-
ter of a bird fancier, a plebeian of the
plebeians. The marriage of her parents
had been sort of bohemian romance
She was born in 1904, among roses TO
the sound of dance music" Then all
the contradictions of her ancestry were
continued in her youthful training. She
passed her girlhOOd in part with her
aristocratic grandmother in the beauti-
full country districts of Berry, partly
with her democratic mother in Paris
partly at a convent. This last she left
at 10, to marry at IS a country squire
who managed her property admirably.
and completely neglected her heart.
She bore neglect as well as she could
and found some consolation in her two
children. But independence was more
to her than any conventional ease.
Gradually after 1929 she came to live
more and more apart, supporting her
self by pen and pencil, till she was leg
ally separated from her husband in
1886 1t is important to any understand
ing of George Sand to bear this unfor-
tun2te marriage in mind. It's humilia-
tons, its revelations, completed her
novelistic outfit for the first period of
her writing. They permeated like yeast
this talent composed of intimate knowl-
edge of ariStocratic life, inherited dem
ocratic sympathies, close contact with
nature and convent-nursed religious
aspirations. All these together blend
in her first novel, Indiana" published
in 1892.
Indiana" achieved immediate and
sensational success, and naturally. for
1t came at a time of romantic mediae-
valism, and stood in refreshing contract
to the artificial sentiment of "Notre
Dame" and of cling Mars" 1t offered
the people and the manners of it's own
day. Here men talked and lived IA
miliarly. We can hardly realize what
an innovation all this was at that date.
George Sand is the mother of 'natur-
alism" in French fiction, just as truly
as Tlaubert is its father.
This naturalistic note runs through
all her novels, however much they may
vary in ether ways. They fill eighty
four volumes. and we must content our
selves here with a general characteri-
cation. So considered the novels fall
into four groups or periods. The first
extends to 1887. Its most characteristic
stories are Leila" and "Mauprat,' but
they all give various phases of her own
experience, and all assert an intense
They are typical novels
of domestic life, the lyric cries of the
misunderstood wife, of genius beating
its wings against the cage bars of So
cial law and custom. She was herself
morbid in those days, and her novels
are So But it would be unjust to judge
George Sand by them as to condemn an
apple tree because its spring fruit is
green and, sour. To the careful reader
these early novels are interesting for
the gradual modification that they ex-