SAND, GEORGE. - Pseudonym of Amandine-Lucie-Aurore Dupin, French writer, b. in Paris on 1 July 1804, d. at Nohant on 7 June 1876.
Born of a Parisian milliner and of Maurice Dupin, grandson of Marshal Maurice of Saxony, from her earliest youth she displayed that rebellious and pretentious, exalted and passionate temperament which was thereafter the tone of her life. At about the age of fifteen she had a crisis of mysticism. At eighteen, in order to make herself independent of her family, she married Casimir Dudevant, a retired colonel, by whom she had two children. In 1831, still in search of freedom, she left her family for Paris, where she began her profession as a writer. Already with her first works, Indiana, Valentine (1832) and Lélia (1833), she achieved notable success, because they fully satisfied the romantic taste of the time. From then on, her life was one continuous succession of piquant and scandalous relationships. Famous is her journey to Venice with de Musset. Among her most notable friendships are those with Heine, Balzac, Flaubert and finally Chopin. She also occupied herself with politics and constituted the first example of a totally "emancipated" woman of modern times.
In her enormous output (over 140 volumes), she sums up the merits and, more especially, the defects of the entire Romantic age, and, owing to a lyricizing and mystifying rhetoric of predominantly Byronic derivation, as well as to a thesis-driven thematic, often informed by confusedly political and social motives, she proves of very slight importance in the judgment of present-day criticism. Her life and her works often constitute a veritable apology for immorality. All her love stories are on the Index (decrees of 27 Nov. 1840; 30 March 1841; 5 Apr. 1842; Dec. 1863).