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Two Letters from Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet

Gustave Flaubert, translated by Geoffrey Wall, 22 June 1995

... he said: ‘I am one of the jealous kind, I would kill a woman, and so on.’ He hasn’t killed George Sand. It was to look like a bit of a rogue that he said: ‘Yesterday I almost slaughtered a journalist.’ Yes, almost, because someone held him back. The journalist might have slaughtered him. It was to sound like a scholar that he said: ‘I read ...

I like you

Hermione Lee: Boston Marriage, 24 May 2007

Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England 
by Sharon Marcus.
Princeton, 356 pp., £12.95, March 2007, 978 0 691 12835 1
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... herself, as made clear by her adventurous escape to Italy with Browning, her admiration for George Sand and her close friendship with the outspoken Anna Jameson, was an exceptionally broad-minded observer. In her eagerness to show the respectability of female marriages, Marcus perhaps doesn’t make enough of the tone of that liberal milieu, in ...

Besieged by Female Writers

John Pemble: Trollope’s Late Style, 3 November 2016

Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form 
by Frederik Van Dam.
Edinburgh, 180 pp., £70, January 2016, 978 0 7486 9955 1
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... tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow … a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.’ Women novelists had come late to English literature, and had no more than a toehold in what was still a male domain. They were second-class citizens – just like their granddaughters and great ...

George and the Dragon

John Burnside, 22 October 2015

... time and time again, the lance fixed in the dragon’s larynx, old blood cooling in the sand, like candlewax, the cave a myth, the storm, mere ornament, the new god in the throne room of high heaven, observing our trespasses, judging us, keeping us ...

Unreal City

Michael Wood, 7 October 1993

Paris and the 19th Century 
by Christopher Prendergast.
Blackwell, 283 pp., £35, June 1993, 0 631 15788 3
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... an implausible imagining’, and to adduce chapter and verse for Emma’s reading of ‘Balzac and George Sand’. Of course it’s not an implausible imagining. When Prendergast later tells us that part of his discussion of Les Misérables has been ‘wilfully flippant’, I had to turn back and scour the previous pages for anything that looked like ...

The Innkeeper’s Daughter

Claire Harman, 16 November 1995

Célestine: Voices from a French Village 
by Gillian Tindall.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 286 pp., £17.99, April 1995, 1 85619 534 1
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... village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France profonde based on the region, though writing the railway out and standardising her peasant characters’ French to make it ...

Possibility throbs

Richard Altick, 23 July 1987

Palais-Royal 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 274 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 571 14718 6
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... to in conversation: the insufferable, histrionic Théophile Gautier in his all-green costume, George Sand, Liszt, Chopin. Several of them attend a soirée given by Liszt’s mistress, Marie, Comtesse d’Agoult. But Sennett adeptly erases the dividing line between fact and fiction. Several well-known public figures are woven into the plot. The ...

To the Manure Born

David Coward: An uncompromising champion of the French republic, 21 July 2005

Memoirs of a Breton Peasant 
by Jean-Marie Déguignet, translated by Linda Asher.
Seven Stories, 432 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 58322 616 8
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... collectors of local lore who sentimentalised the country: not merely the ‘thief’ Le Braz but George Sand, whom he accused of refusing to accept that manure is as much a natural wonder as a pretty flower. He regarded the proliferation of ‘No Fishing/Hunting/Trespassing’ signs as a clear indication that the old feudalism of the landed gentry had ...

At the Helm of the World

Pankaj Mishra: Alexander Herzen, 1 June 2017

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen 
by Aileen Kelly.
Harvard, 582 pp., £31.95, May 2016, 978 0 674 73711 2
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... passage through the first half of the 19th century: Schiller, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Fourier, George Sand, Feuerbach, Louis Blanc and, crucially, Proudhon. The young Herzen, awed and fascinated by European ideas and achievements, tended to blame the tsars for his country’s pitiable backwardness. The Slavophiles and gradualists who preached caution ...

Victor Ludorum

Julian Symons, 20 December 1990

The Complete Short Stories 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 1220 pp., £25, November 1990, 0 7011 3712 6
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Lasting Impressions 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 171 pp., £15.99, November 1990, 0 7011 3606 5
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... and Cruikshank and Trollope, a slew of Americans and a galaxy of European stars from Balzac and George Sand to Turgenev and Musil, is to leave this reader at least stunned with admiration for the sympathy, originality and fresh turn of phrase constantly shown. Just as the short story is the ideal length for Pritchett as creative writer, so the longish ...

Doubling the Oliphant

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 September 1995

Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’ 
by Elisabeth Jay.
Oxford, 355 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 19 812875 4
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... someone else and that is all the better in this point of view – for what could be said of me? George Eliot and George Sand make me half inclined to cry over my poor little unappreciated self ... I would not buy their fame with their disadvantages, but I do feel very small, very obscure beside them, rather a failure ...

Yuk’s Last Laugh

Tim Parks: Flaubert, 15 December 2016

Flaubert 
by Michel Winock, translated by Nicholas Elliott.
Harvard, 528 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 674 73795 2
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... pearls of salt water, your dripping clothes and your white foot with pink nails sinking into the sand, and that this vision is always present, and that it always whispers to my heart? Oh! No, all is empty. The words are addressed to a character who closely resembles Elisa Foucault, with whom the 14-year-old Flaubert had fallen in love on the beach at ...

Just William

Doris Grumbach, 25 June 1987

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice 
by Sharon O’Brien.
Oxford, 544 pp., £22.50, March 1987, 0 19 504132 1
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... in her heroines, the lost ladies Marian Forrester, Myra Henshawe, Sapphira Colbert. A portrait of George Sand hung in an honoured place in the Cather-Lewis apartment in Greenwich Village. Visions of accomplished, larger-than-life women (Sappho, actresses, Wagnerian singers) deeply affected her fiction. In an astute reading of Cather’s early journalism ...

Ranklings

Philip Horne, 30 August 1990

Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 
edited by Lyall Powers.
Weidenfeld, 412 pp., £25, May 1990, 9780297810605
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... and subjects: the gossip of the circle, dates and times of visits and rendezvous, the love-life of George Sand, the state of the Wharton marriage, the affair Mrs Wharton carried on with James’s friend Fullerton, the art of fiction, James’s state of health, and, to cap and threaten it all, the War. Some of these, it must be said, are more rewarding to ...

English Words and French Authors

John Sturrock, 8 February 1990

A New History of French Literature 
edited by Denis Hollier.
Harvard, 1280 pp., £39.95, October 1989, 0 674 61565 4
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... as ‘con artists’). Of the women writers for whom admission to the canon is demanded, one, George Sand, has surely never been dropped from it, but another, the late 18th-century novelist, Isabelle de Charrière, is argued for extremely effectively by Joan Hinde Stewart. And should gender fail, geography is enlisted further to stretch the limits of ...

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