LOVE'S ROUNDABOUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 741, 25 September 1953, Page 13

LOVE'S ROUNDABOUT

LELIA, the Life of George Sand, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins; Jonathan Cape. English price, 25/-. EORGE SAND’S novels are not much read today, even in France; and Andre Maurois believes that her reputation as a writer has suffered undeservedly. In a long and rather closelyprinted biography he makes use of new documents to explain the connection between George's childhood, her work as a novelist, her misconduct and frustrations. She was the daughter of Maurice Dupin, a young soldier of good birth who had taken fog mistress and had later married "an extremely pretty, laughing and charming girl," a camp follower with Bonaparte’s army in Italy. The father was thrown from his horse and killed while his daughter, Aurore, was still a child. Her mother was unstable; she quarrelled with the head of the family, Aurore’s grandmother, and could not give the child the love she needed. The loss of her father, and her mother’s coldness, drove the imaginative girl to identify herself with the father’s image, and this led her into’ masculine habits which were curiously at odds with her essential femininity. These early difficulties were seen to have had a lasting effect after she madé an unsatisfactory marriage. Aurore behaved badly; she deserted her husband, had a succession of affairs with writers" and artists-including Musset and Chopin-and was betrayed by excess of sentiment into absurd situations. Yet beneath her posturing and her pseudo-masculinity she was always a woman. looking for love, though held back from passion by a coldness which can now be seen to have been psychological in origin. But she was also a gifted and prolific writer, producing novels which placed her among the great literary figures of France in the middle years of the 19th Century. Her own story of frustrated passion was told partly in Lélia; and Maurois draws on this novel and on autobiographical writings for the materials of a sympathetic portrait. George Sand has been fortunate in her latest biographer. Maurois has always excelled in studies of the literary temperament. In his new book he explains George Sand’s character with insight and delicacy. The men of letters and artists among whom she moved are brought back to life; their . friendships, feuds and intrigues come vividly into the story; and the whole book has the un-

mistakable flavour of its period.

H.