George Sand (1804 - 1876)

The free-spirited author, George Sand, scandalized 19th-century Paris when she defied convention and pioneered an independent path for women with her passionate search for a new way of being. She was of prodigious energies, managing to produce 70 novels, 24 plays, 40,000 letters and more. During her career she played an important, if long underestimated, role in the evolution of the novel. Sand questioned the sexual identity and gender destinies in fiction. Legendary for her free life, cigar-smoking, and scandalous cross-dressing, Sand herself was accused of lesbianism and nymphomania, partly because of affairs with well-known celebrity particularly those with the French poet Alfred de Musset and the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.