Sand, Georges.

La Mare Au Diable.

Éditions Du Centenaire. Paris, Calmann-Lévy, no year (c.1921-1922) / [1851 (Notice)]. Octavo. III, 217, (2) pages. Hardcover. Original half-leather with original dustjacket / brochure bound in. Very good condition with only minor signs of wear. Some rubbing to binding. Minimal signs of foxing. Very firm !

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. Being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She has more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.

Like her great-grandmother, Louise Dupin, whom she admired, George Sand advocated for women’s rights and passion, criticized the institution of marriage, and fought against the prejudices of a conservative society. She was considered scandalous because of her turbulent love life, her adoption of masculine clothing, and her masculine pseudonym.

Influences on literature

Fyodor Dostoevsky “read widely in the numerous novels of George Sand” and translated her La dernière Aldini in 1844, only to learn that it had already been published in Russian. In his mature period, he expressed an ambiguous attitude towards her. For instance, in his novella Notes from Underground, the narrator refers to sentiments he expresses as, “I launch off at that point into European, inexplicably lofty subtleties à la George Sand”.

The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) wrote two poems: “To George Sand: A Desire” (1853) and “To George Sand: A Recognition”. The American poet Walt Whitman cited Sand’s novel Consuelo as a personal favorite, and the sequel to this novel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, contains at least a couple of passages that appear to have had a very direct influence on him.

In addition to her influences on English and Russian literature, Sand’s writing and political views informed numerous 19th century authors in Spain and Latin America, including Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the Cuban-born writer who also published and lived in Spain. Critics have noted structural and thematic similarities between George Sand’s Indiana, published in 1832, and Gómez de Avellaneda’s anti-slavery novel Sab, published in 1841.

In the first episode of the “Overture” to Swann’s Way—the first novel in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time sequence—a young, distraught Marcel is calmed by his mother as she reads from François le Champi, a novel which (it is explained) was part of a gift from his grandmother, which also included La Mare au Diable, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maîtres Sonneurs. As with many episodes involving art in À la recherche du temps perdu, this reminiscence includes commentary on the work.

Sand is also referred to in Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay A Room of One’s Own along with George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë as “all victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man.″

Frequent literary references to George Sand appear in Possession (1990) by A. S. Byatt and in the play Voyage, the first part of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002). George Sand makes an appearance in Isabel Allende’s Zorro, going still by her given name, as a young girl in love with Diego de la Vega (Zorro).

Chopin, Sand and her children are the main characters of the theater play by Polish writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz A Summer in Nohant, which premiered in 1930. The play, presenting the final stage of the writer-composer’s relationship, was adapted five times by Polish Television: in 1963 (with Antonina Gordon-Górecka as Sand and Gustaw Holoubek as Chopin), in 1972 (with Halina Mikolajska and Leszek Herdegen), in 1980 (with Anna Polony and Michal Pawlicki), in 1999 (with Joanna Szczepkowska, who portrayed Solange in the 1980 version and Piotr Skiba) and in 2021 (with Katarzyna Herman and Marek Kossakowski). (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: 19th Century – Rare · 19th Century Literature · Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Catalogue Three – Literature by Women · Feminism – Rare · French Literature – Rare · Women in History · Women in History – Rare · Women in Literature
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31985AB

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