The figure of the 19th-century French writer, George Sand, is ripe for retrospective caricature. The image of the cross-dressing, cigar-smoking, bisexual protofeminist and long-time lover of Chopin, says Belinda Jack, has eclipsed her stature as a major and influential writer of her time.
Despite her crowded and colourful personal life - indeed, Jack contends, because of it - Sand produced 80 novels and works of fiction as well as plays, essays, journalism and autobiography. Her published correspondence alone stretches to 25 volumes.
She was born Aurore Dupin in Paris in July 1804 - "the last year of the Republic, the first year of Empire". According to Sand's autobiography, Histoire de ma Vie, the scene of her birth was a gay and rather theatrical affair. A party is in progress. Her father, Maurice Dupin, is playing the violin and her mother, Sophie-Victoire, is dancing though she has already gone full-term. During the dance she feels the first stirrings of labour and is removed to an adjoining room. By the end of the dance, Sophie-Victoire's sister, Lucie, leads Maurice from the room with the news "you have a daughter". She then apparently tells the assembled company that the child "born into pink and music" will be happy.
Sand's father, Maurice Dupin, grew up in an aristocratic though staunchly Republican milieu - his mother was connected through an illegitimate line to the Bourbon kings of France. Her mother, on the other hand, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a former prostitute, whose father had been the proprietor of a billiards hall and had sold canaries and goldfinches on the street. The two had married in secret and Dupin only informed his mother of the match when the baby Aurore was born.
The contradictions in Sand's character - her flamboyant public persona coupled with the intense almost religious fervour of her interior life - were partly fostered by this very early drama of class which her own birth represented.
But it was the death of her father in 1808, after a fall from a horse, that brought the two conflicting influences in the child Aurore's life into sharp focus. Her imaginative and fiercely Catholic mother took on her pragmatic, strong-willed grandmother, a reader of Voltaire and Rousseau. The grandmother prevailed, taking over the care and education of her much-cherished granddaughter, while Sand's mother was dispatched to Paris.
Sand's grandmother, grieving over the loss of her only son, provided for Sand what she later described as a boy's education, courtesy of her father's tutor.
Her grandmother was a hard taskmistress and whereas Sand's mother had encouraged her daydreaming and story-telling, her grandmother actively discouraged her very active and imaginative inner life.
Further contradiction was heaped upon the child when, aged 13, Sand's grandmother sent her to a convent to further her education, though she herself despised the Church. Although she hated it at first, Sand gradually adapted to the cloistered life, so much so that by 1820 she believed she had a vocation - which was the trigger for her grandmother to remove her promptly.
The two years after leaving the convent were spent with her now more mellow grandmother, a time when her literary education was decisively forged. She read voraciously under her grandmother's tutelage - Shakespeare, Moliere, Byron, Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, and Montaigne among others - many of them texts which had been proscribed by the Church.
In 1822 Sand's grandmother died and shortly afterwards she married Casimir Dudevant. The couple lived in her grandmother's house in Nohant, southeast of Paris. It was not a happy union and after the birth of her son, Maurice, and daughter, Solange, the couple came to an arrangement that Sand (the nom de plume she had chosen by using the first syllable of her lover Jules Sandeau's surname) would spend six months of the year in Paris. It was here in 1831 that she started her career as a writer, first as a columnist for Figaro, the only woman on the staff of the paper at the time.
Writing, for Sand was a way primarily to achieve financial independence and to move her children to Paris. But by 1832, aged 27, Sand had become an overnight literary sensation with the publication of her second novel, Indiana. The success that ensued also gave her the freedom to pursue a lifestyle that marriage in the provinces and financial dependence on a husband would not have allowed. She was an early advocate of equality between the sexes and considered marriage a "barbarous institution". Her writing, while high-blown and gothic to our late 20th century eyes, contained much foreshadowing of early psychoanalysis, with its preoccupation with the world of dreams and the unconscious, and its themes of incest and sexuality.
Certainly Sand had affairs with some of the most influential men of her time - the writers, Alfred Musset, Prosper e, Merimee, and the engraver, Alexandre Manceau. And, of course, Chopin. There was also the celebrated relationship with the actress, Marie Dorval. But her quest was for a supreme kind of companionship which would be spiritual, passionate and intellectual. It was a tall order, particularly from a woman who declared that "life was a wound that never heals".
But by the end of her life (she died in 1876) if Sand had not managed to sustain the kind of unconditional love she craved, she had developed a real talent for friendship. She would count Liszt, Delacroix and Balzac among her close circle. Her lengthy correspondence with Flaubert, in particular, reveals a sharp mind, a compassionate heart and a warm but direct sense of humour.
By concentrating on Sand's early childhood and the political and historical forces at play in the writer's young life, Belinda Jack successfully sidesteps the narrow stereotypes that continue to dog Sand. Her thesis that Sand explored not one self but multiple selves as an author, socialist, political commentator, flamboyant genius, humanist, pacifist, wife, mother, lover and in the end grand old dame - gives the reader a view of Sand in the round rather than merely the cigartoting dilettante in boots and frock coat. But sadly, it doesn't make this reader wish to return to the work. George Sand's life, in the end, proves more compelling than her oeuvre.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist, whose new book, The Pretender, will be published next February; she is also an Irish Times journalist