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“... One would like to know more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. Gildea ends his account on a happy note: French political myths of both Left and Right are, he thinks, alive and well. Indeed, French political traditions ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”