Free Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru Page A

she held steady with her writing, producing a staggering number of novels, plays, essays, and other works. She also painted, and she was an astonishingly prolific letter writer; her published correspondence includes more than fifteen thousand letters. Yet she also happily engaged in so-called women’s work—making jam, doing needlework, and immersing herself in her beloved garden. Although she would periodically take stock of “the irregularity of my essentially feminine constitution,” she was never shaken by what she viewed as the mutability of the self. Given the choice between conforming to prevailing customs and doing as she wished, she simply alternated between the two. It was not always easy, yet she was constitutionally incapable of remaining in a fixed state:
    I was not a woman completely like those whom some moralists censure and mock; I had in my soul an enthusiasm for the beautiful, a thirst for the true; and yet I was a woman like others—dependent, nervous, prey to my imagination, childishly susceptible to the emotionalism and anxieties of motherhood. But did these traits have to relegate me to secondary standing in artistic and family life? That being society’s rule, it was still within my power to submit patiently or cheerfully.
    As Sand’s biographer Belinda Jack noted, “[H]er modernity lies less in her feminism or her socialism, and more in her acceptance of loose, even freewheeling ideas about the self. . . . She had strong intuitions about the subconscious and the need to be aware of our inner unthinking, but acutely responsive, selves.”
    To Sand, this was a natural, normal idea. It was far ahead of her time; she worked tirelessly so that others might embrace it. In her autobiography, Sand expressed a desire to achieve societal acceptance not for herself only, but for other women. “I was going along nourishing a dream of male virtue to which women could aspire,” she wrote, “and was constantly examining my soul with a naïve curiosity to find out whether it had the power of such aspirations, and whether uprightness, unselfishness, discretion, perseverance in work—all the strengths, in short, that man attributes exclusively to himself—were actually unavailable to a heart which accepted the concept of them so ardently. . . . I wondered why Montaigne would not have liked and respected me as much as a brother.”
    No less than George Eliot’s future partner, the critic George Henry Lewes, declared in 1842 that Sand was the most remarkable writer of the century. Dostoevsky considered her “one of the most brilliant, the most indomitable, and the most perfect champions.”
    The last years of her life were often filled with sadness, as by then many of her friends and former lovers were dead. But she was one of the most influential and famous women in France, and possessed remarkable serenity after all that she’d endured. Unfortunately, her reputation did not hold up well after her death. Her prodigious output was eclipsed by the shocking, scandalous details of her life. Compared with her contemporaries, she is hardly read today. “The world will know and understand me someday,” Sand once wrote. “But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.” In that regard, she succeeded beyond measure.
    â€œWhat a brave man she was,” Turgenev recalled of Sand, “and what a good woman.”
    Her old friend Flaubert, a notorious misanthrope and recluse, outlived her by four years. Of her funeral in 1876, he said: “I cried like an ass.”

She had a big nose and the face of a withered cabbage
    Chapter 3
    George Eliot & MARIAN EVANS
    C harles Dickens was suspicious. “I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now,” he