George Sand, the author who outsold Victor Hugo (with Fiona Sampson)

"We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies," she said of 19th-century girls. Her best-selling novels were an indictment of arranged marriages and the female condition. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Today, we don't read her. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her private life, a scandalous reputation that pop culture has overblown.

A new biography of George Sand by British academic and poet Fiona Sampson reveals a thoroughly modern woman, who was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person. 

Creators & Guests

• Isabelle Roughol - Host
• Fiona Sampson - Guest

★ Support this podcast ★  

🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9781529924336 
🇺🇸 Buy the book in the US: https://bookshop.org/a/79408/9781324074915 
(Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores.)

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Chapters: 

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:43) - How female authors drop out of the literary canon
• (05:07) - A girl of two worlds
• (09:02) - Nohant and a custody battle between two women
• (11:54) - George and boyhood
• (13:36) - To be a girl in the Bridgerton years: "we raise them like saints, we hand them over like fillies"
• (18:13) - How women writers rose in service to a growing reading public
• (20:09) - From unhappy provincial wife to Parisian auteur
• (24:24) - The making of a nom de plume
• (26:34) - What cross-dressing means to George
• (29:28) - Pushing the boundaries of a gendered language
• (32:12) - The writer of the female condition and the tragedy of marriage
• (38:00) - George Sand, international best-selling author
• (40:24) - The process of self-invention
• (45:41) - Outro

Click here to view the episode transcript.