Curious George: Revisiting a writer's turbulent, adventurous life
Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand
By Benita Eisler
Counterpoint, 308 pp., $26.95
The woman born Aurore Dupin and known to history as "George Sand" invented herself -- with a push from her publisher and a little help from a soon-to-be-discarded lover who donated part of her masculine pseudonym -- in 1832, reinvented herself more than once during the course of her long literary career, and has been reinvented many times since. Her most recent major revival in the United States, during the mid-1970s, coincided with the height of the feminist movement, which found an exemplary, although ultimately complicated, foremother in Sand's cigar-smoking, pants-wearing public persona. Curtis Cate's respectful and massive biography of 1975 hit bookstores in almost perfect synchronization with American public television's broadcast of a "Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries that chronicled Sand's life from the disintegration of her marriage through her removal to Paris, her adoption of men's clothing, her rise to literary celebrity, and her many love affairs, including those with the poet Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin.
Since the 1970s, portrayals of Sand have tended to be narrower in focus. The 1991 film "Impromptu " featured Judy Davis as Sand, and took as its subject the household Sand formed for a time with Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Liszt's mistress . Dan Hofstadter's chapter on Sand in his 1996 "The Love Affair as a Work of Art " emphasized the most literary of Sand's affairs, that with de Musset, which generated an astonishing record of back-and-forth autobiographical accounts, published literary letters, and posthumously published private letters . It was of this affair's published correspondence that Henry James wrote in 1897 that the "lovers are naked in the market-place and perform for the benefit of society." No less fascinated than James, Hofstadter gave Sand pride of place in a lineage of authors, from Benjamin Constant through Proust .
Benita Eisler's elegant new biography , "Naked in the Marketplace ," returns American readers to the full cradle-to-grave drama of Sand's life, but with a certain amount of post-1990s streamlining. Presenting a biography of Sand in fewer than 300 pages is a genuine feat of art, requiring a certain amount of omission and compression of Sand's adventures. Tracking 19th-century Parisian wars of words, Eisler follows only the blows that land. Slimmer by half than most current high-end literary biographies , "Naked in the Marketplace " nevertheless provides a compelling picture of Sand's successive literary and political makeovers.
Like Hofstadter, Eisler takes the keynote of her biography from James's essay, but she presents a more Americanized perspective on her protagonist. The book opens with a story of Sand's 1845 encounter with White Cloud, a warrior of the Ioway tribe brought to Paris as part of an exhibition assembled by the American painter George Catlin. Sand fell in with the European romantic craze for all things Indian, gushing in print over White Cloud's "affectionate and noble discourse" -- but she also, Eisler notes, did investigative research into tribal rights, broken treaties, and the wasting of Indian settlements by disease. Like a modern-day celebrity journalist, Sand was at once a sympathetic observer and part of the show.
Eisler speculates that troubled mother-daughter relations drove Sand's perpetual motion from lover to lover: "For all her notorious affairs with men, Sand's passionate and unrequited attachment to her mother is the real love story of her life." Her father's accidental death left the care of 4-year-old Aurore divided between her well-born but chilly paternal grandmother and her working-class mother, Sophie Delaborde. Aurore was bitterly hurt when her mother, desperate for an allowance, gave her up to Madame Dupin; she was devastated when her grandmother retaliated for her rebellious attachment to Delaborde by telling Aurore her mother's history as a prostitute and camp follower and by hinting -- truthfully, as Sand's own research later confirmed -- that Maurice Dupin might not have been her father.
Decades later, Sand would pass on this history of maternal abandonment with her daughter, Solange, packing her off to boarding school and treating her with a cruelty that must have been all the more painful by contrast with Sand's generosity in adopting other people and causes. Sand's public writing never fully acknowledged what she learned about her parentage; only in recent years did scholars discover how thoroughly Sand had investigated her grandmother's allegations. By then, Sand's self-branding as a representative "daughter of the people," descended from an aristocratic father and a working-class mother, may have been in the marketplace too long to be recalled and long enough to have become true after its fashion. Eisler has the moral courage to confront Sand's failures along with her generosity; just as important, she has the grace not to rebuke Sand's nakedness for being, in fact, clothed in fiction.
Mary Loeffelholz is a member of the Northeastern University English department and the author of books on Emily Dickinson and modernist women writers . 
