Locking George Sand in the Attic: Female Passion and Domestic Realism in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

George Sand's fiction was widely read in England in the nineteenth century, perhaps more widely than that of any other foreign author of note. As Patricia Thomson notes, although Sand's 'influence on the Victorian reading public and, more importantly, on Victorian writers was enormous ... it has now been almost completely forgotten' (1). Today Sand is known most often for the details of her personal life (recently the subject of the rather fanciful movie Impromptu), though there has been something of a renaissance of critical interest among scholars of French literature, and there have been two studies of her influence on Victorian literature. However, it seems that the effects of these studies have not been fully assimilated by students of English literature, judging by the relative scarcity of references to Sand in criticism of major Victorian writers.