
Indeed most of the notable artistic figures of her day became her friends, often despite themselves, visiting her at her glorious country estate at Nohant, in Berry, or in Paris. Her long love affair with Chopin was only one of a large number of affairs with well-known figures of her times, mostly writers, mostly some years younger than And there is something exaggerated about almost every aspect of her life. But the familiar caricature I had first encountered is not altogether fanciful: exaggeration lends itself naturally to parody and comic representation.

The woman I found out more about then is not the woman I know now. In short, the origin of this biography was my discovery, twenty years ago, of a possible role model, at once intriguing, inspiring, and subversive. To be explored and explained? And what inner compulsion explained her quite extraordinary productivity? How had she maintained her prolific writing while enjoying such an active, highly colourful, and daring private life? Variously described not in relation to her writing but rather as a frigid, bisexual, nymphomaniac, or "Good Lady of Nohant." Were there not, the indignant primitive feminist in me asked, contradictions and prejudices She is France's most famous nineteenth-century woman writer, but she is best known as the famous lover of the celebrated Chopin, and I wondered particularly about the hidden life of George Sand, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 and died in 1876. Then there are cartoons, quite as vicious as today's cartoons of media figures caught Of her in later life are full of character: there is remarkable strength in her face, but also the suggestion that she has suffered.

She is beautiful only in some, but her eyes are always beguiling, disproportionately large, almost black, and invariably mysterious. I found portraits of her: drawings, engravings, and paintings. She seemed a fantastically vampish yet androgynous figure, and her sexuality struck me as peculiarly

I was astonished and delighted when I first discovered her in my teens. There is something wonderfully excessive about George Sand's life and writing.
