George Sand

A scrupulously researched and tenderly revealing biography of one of the great pioneering figures of 19th-century French literature. Born in 1804 - at a time when women were deprived of their civil rights (along with minors, criminals, and the insane) - Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin grew up to defy those norms, both in her life and her writing. Adopting the gender-neutral pen-name George Sand, and in a career lasting over forty years as a novelist and playwright, she is best remembered today for the affairs and friendships she enjoyed with men: the composer Chopin; the painter Delacroix; the novelist Balzac. But this moving biographical portrait, written by Severine Vidal and illustrated by Kim Consigny, restores her to the centre-stage she always commanded in her lifetime. Not just as the daring, scandalously cross-dressing, bisexual, cigarettesmoking divorcee novelist, but as the brilliant chronicler of her changing time - and therefore of ours.