If we really are in a reading crisis – whether you blame TikTok or podcasts – it stands to reason that, of all the genres, literary biography might have particular cause to fear for its life: who wants the life story of somebody whose books no one reads?
Such anxiety, justified or not, can be heard jangling away in the background amid some of the noisier claims made by Fiona Sampson at the start of her new biography of the pseudonymous 19th-century author George Sand, “one of the most famous writers in the world, at a time when books had something of the glamour that would later surround, say, Hollywood movies”. Best known for the 1832 novel Indiana, whose eponymous young heroine walks out on a loveless age-gap marriage, Sand’s life “reveals … the nature of all lives as self-invention”, not least because she scandalously wore trousers: “by suiting up as a garçon she was, criss-cross, acknowledging that to be a writing woman is a little off-centre: is queer,” writes Sampson, calling Sand “one of the boldest precursors of that perhaps final hope modernity holds out: that we might choose what we become”.
You needn’t buy any of that to enjoy the engaging narrative Sampson proceeds to unspool with elegant source-sifting and empathetic guesswork. She suggests convincingly that Sand – born Aurore Dupin in 1804 to an aristocrat and a sex worker in Paris – was shaped from her earliest years by a clash of competing identities, uprooted in early childhood to a manor in rural France, raised by her grandmother after her father’s death when she was four. Returning to the city in adulthood, she launched herself as a cross-dressing, cigar‑smoking writer about town. Courageously winning custody of her children after leaving a husband who hit her, she embarked on love affairs with the pianist Fryderyk Chopin, the actress Marie Dorval (or so rumour had it) and the writer Alfred de Musset – an entanglement that, after his death, became the basis for a sensational autobiographical novel Elle et Lui (1859), autofiction avant la lettre.
As much as her fiction, Sand has been read for her correspondence, including a devoted 12-year exchange with Flaubert. Sampson points to a letter sympathising with the horror felt by a new bride on her wedding night, frequently quoted but often ignoring the letter’s practical element of advice in favour of presenting Sand as somehow anti-sex: “Tell [the bridegroom] to spare his pleasure a little and wait till his wife is gradually brought to him to understand it and respond to it.” Sand was never an innocent, Sampson goes on to explain, because she was raised in the deep country among rutting wildlife – the kind of imaginative speculation in which Becoming George specialises, with variable results. Of the marital strife experienced by Sand’s mother after losing a child, Sampson says: “She’s every woman who feels her man isn’t supporting her in the extremity of grief …”
The universalising tendency can feel overly keen to put the modern reader at ease – at one point Sand is compared to a “yummy mummy” and her habit of reading aloud as a teenager to her grandmother is explained thus: “In the 21st century this will sound improving, even restfully monastic, but in the 19th century it’s a form of shared narrative entertainment that is the closest equivalent to crowding on to the sofa to watch appointment TV together.” Sampson’s present-tense narration hustles us along throughout, as if we’re always in danger of losing interest. Paragraphs repeatedly begin with an abrupt needle drop, jolting our attention anew. “But that’s three decades in the future,” writes Sampson, resetting the scene. “On this summer evening in 1823 Aurore is just … a young wife missing her husband”; exactly the same trick is pulled on the facing page: “But not yet. For now she’s a young mother who needs all the confidence intimacy can provide.”
Yet the sense grows that we’re being energetically told a story without ever quite being sure of why. While Sampson worries that Sand’s colourful life overshadows her art, the book’s method does little to redress that. Its subtitle, The Invention of George Sand, suggests a dual focus – both authorship and self-authorship – but it’s the latter story, the life, that predominates, much of the material mined from Sand’s own five-volume autobiography. In the end, Sampson’s contention that Sand was “one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century” doesn’t get much by way of support, the biography belting through nearly two dozen of her 70-plus titles in just two pages near the end. A chance to assert Sand’s contemporary relevance goes astray: Mauprat, her 1837 tale of a rough antihero softened by love, plausibly inspired novel-of-the-moment Wuthering Heights – but the connection is missed and Sampson brushes past it as an “unlikely fantasy”.
Even for Sampson, Sand’s importance seems to lie less in her writing than in what she represents as a woman surmounting the odds of her sexist habitat – and no wonder, given that the diarist Edmond de Goncourt eulogised Sand’s talent after her death in 1876 by observing that an autopsy would have shown her clitoris to “somewhat resemble our penises”. You can see what Sand was up against; however understandable this biography’s impulses, though, there’s a gap at its heart.
• Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson is published by Doubleday (£22.00). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
