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Becoming George
  • Published: 19 February 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529924329
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

Becoming George

The Invention of George Sand

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Cigar smoking, gender-nonconforming, bisexual, polyamorous - and the intellectual equal of any man - George Sand was the beating heart of the Paris literary scene. Award-winning Fiona Sampson MBE reassesses this uniquely modern figure.

Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself - cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society.

What can we learn from the way she lived? 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 Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself?

In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.
  • Published: 19 February 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529924329
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

About the author

Fiona Sampson

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. Translated into over thirty languages, she’s the author of two acclaimed biographies. In Search of Mary Shelley was an Observer, Independent, Financial Times and a Times Book of the Year. Two-Way Mirror was Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times ‘Editors' Choice’, finalist for the Plutarch Prize & US PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld international award for biography.

FS

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Praise for Becoming George

‘I mourn a dead woman and I salute an immortal one.’ Victor Hugo ‘That men have been able to fall in love with this latrine, is the proof of the abasement of this century’s men.’ Charles Baudelaire ‘An abundance of milk[; a] dairy cow with a "beautiful style".’ Friedrich Nietzsche 'One had to know her as I did to know how much of the feminine was in that great man, the immensity of tenderness in that genius. Her name will live in unique glory as one of the great figures of France.' Gustave Flaubert 'My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress. […] Be reassured, I do not aspire to the dignity of man. It seems to me too laughable to be much preferable to the servility of woman. But I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which you alone believe you have the right to enjoy. […] So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.' George Sand

The words of Sand and her contemporaries