Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Sampson, Fiona

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

By the age of thirty, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a...
$42.00 USD
$42.00 USD
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Author: Fiona Sampson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $42.00
Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Sampson, Fiona

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

$42.00

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

$42.00
Author: Fiona Sampson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English

By the age of thirty, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a Paris garret had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her novels were outselling even Victor Hugo. Her enormous and radical corpus would grow to include seventy novels, travel writing, plays, autobiography, and political writing. But despite this prodigious talent, Sand was simultaneously a figure of scandal. Cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women.

Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy? Or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day--from Fryderyk Chopin to Gustave Flaubert, and Alfred de Musset to Eugène Delacroix--form part of her dialogue with the world around her: a dialogue that's intrinsic to writing itself? To what extent do we invent ourselves? And what can we learn, from Sand's life and art, about how writers in particular invent themselves, and are reinvented by the society around them?

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Sand's death, and Becoming George is a fitting celebration of her literary genius--as well as the first new biography in nearly twenty-five years. Award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates an artistic and intellectual giant who still speaks to us today. Brilliantly prescient--about ecology, politics, society, gender--George Sand was truly a figure ahead of her time.



Author: Fiona Sampson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 06/23/2026
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.44h x 6.32w x 1.37d
ISBN: 9781324074915


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/13/2026
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2026

About the Author
Sampson, Fiona: - Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL is a leading British poet, a writer, and Romanticist. Professor Emerita of Poetry, University of Roehampton and Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College University of Oxford, she has received numerous national and international literary awards and been published in thirty-eight languages. Becoming George completes a trilogy of acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley, a London Times Book of the Year, was followed by Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times bestseller, and finalist for the Plutarch Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography.

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