1804-07-01

GEORGE SAND, French writer born (d. 1876); born Amandine-Aurore-Lucille Dupin, George Sand was the pseudonym for Aurore Dudevant (neé Dupin), Although she dressed like a man, wrote novels under a male pseudonym, and is known to have had relationships with women (the writer Alfred Vigny referred to her vehemently as “that Lesbian”), Lesbianism never occurs in the romantic novels of George Sand.

Her affairs with prominent men were the talk of Europe and were exploited in her fiction, but she maintained a discreet silence about the friendship of women, even though modern critics are in agreement that her female characters are all independent and dominant women like herself, “masculine” they say with more than a touch of bias.

That George Sand chose never to write about Lesbianism is understandable. She had sufficient trouble in establishing her independence as a woman to worry about supplying weapons to the enemy. When she died, Turgenev wrote to Flaubert, “What a good man she was, and what a kind woman.”