In Our Time - George Sand

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works and life of one of the most popular writers in Europe in C19th, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) who wrote under the name George Sand. When she wrote her first novel under that name, she referred to herself as a man. This was in Indiana (1832), which had the main character breaking away from her unhappy marriage. It made an immediate impact as it overturned the social conventions of the time and it drew on her own early marriage to an older man, Casimir Dudevant. Once Sand's identity was widely known, her works became extremely popular in French and in translation, particularly her rural novels, outselling Hugo and Balzac in Britain, perhaps buoyed by an interest in her personal life, as well as by her ideas on the rights and education of women and strength of her writing.With Belinda Jack Fellow and Tutor in French at Christ Church, University of OxfordAngela Ryan Senior Lecturer in French at University College CorkAndNigel Harkness Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of French at Newcastle UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Georges Saint-804 to 1876, was one of the most popular and celebrated French novelists in the 19th century, and she defied conventions.

She wrote under a man's name, she could dress like a man, and she lived with the freedom that only men had in France, and she wished other women could share her freedom. If her characters respected each other as equals, they could overcome differences in age, wealth or class, and find happiness in love. If not, they faced the misery she'd escaped in her own marriage

and which she saw in so many others. With me to discuss George Saund are Angela Ryan, senior lecturer in French at University College Cork, Nigel Harkness, Provost Chais Chancellor for Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of French and Newcastle University and Belinda Jack, fellow and tutor in French at Christchurch University of Oxford.

Belinda Jack, what was her family background? Well, her family background was very mixed and really very interesting. On her father's side, she was aristocratic with links to the royal family, the French kings, mostly through illegitimate connections. On her mother's side, her mother was working class in her husband. autobiography, she described her mother as a dancer or less than a dancer. What does that mean? Well, the implication was that she was a cortisans.

Right. So she had these two really very different parents with very different backgrounds. And that meant that from early on she had two, to some degree, two really very different visions of life. One rather grand and well-heeled and one really very impoverished. And that kind of contrast is visible in all sorts of aspects of her early life. So she spent time in Paris with her mother and her father, who was an officer in the army, so he came and went. But then early on, she also spent time at Noor, which was her grandmother's estate,

southwest of Paris. And so she also had a clear sense of differences between urban and rural. With her grandmother, who was very in many ways, Her grandmother still let her run wild on this great estate, believed in Russo, the untempered, unchained child. And she took great advantage of that. She certainly did. Yes, her grandmother was an odd contradiction, really,

because she was very severe and believed very much in the intellectual life. She read the Enlightenment philosophers that you've mentioned and insisted that Oroix, as she was as a child, spoke proper French. But on the other hand, under the influence, of Rousseau and his ideas about the importance of the natural. She was allowed to run wild on the estate. She was allowed to mix with the estate children. And she learnt Bericheng, which was the local patois.

So in a sense, she was also bilingual. So when talking about these contrasts in terms of class, there's also an interesting contrast between proper French and the local argo, the local patois. We missed out of God. What had happened to her father and a mother that she went to live alone with her grandmother? Well, so she started life in Paris.

Her parents married. But what had happened to those two? And they moved, well, she went with her mother to Madrid, where her father had been posted. And it was in Madrid that her brother was conceived. And the family then returned to the grandmother's estate at Noor. And two terrible things happened, and she was still only five at the time.

Her brother, who'd been born in Madrid, died as a baby. and her mother was quite extraordinarily distressed by that. And a few days later, her father was killed in a riding accident. So she lost both her new baby brother and her father. When she went to this aristocratic grandmother on this huge estate, did her mother go with her? Her mother came and went, but quite early on, her grandmother thought that her mother wasn't really suitable to bring her up.

And so she was, well, to say she was sold as a slight exaggeration, but her grandmother made sure that her mother would be able to manage in Paris on a pension in exchange in effect for Oroix and the little girl from then on was on the estate until she became so wild that her grandmother decided that she needed to be brought to heel and she was packed off not only to a convent but to an English-speaking convent in Paris yet another huge contrast in lifestyle that she had to adjust to. And she was married young, she married young. She married really, she hadn't very much choice.

So her grandmother died when she was 17. She returned to Paris to live with her mother. And it was a very chaotic life that her mother led. And so the year after, aged 18, she made a what turned out to be pretty inappropriate marriage to another French officer. It's quite a fast-living, past moving 17 years, isn't it really? Well, it is. and of course that's the stuff of the writer.

Absolutely. Angela Ryan, the events of that century have, as has been alluded to, bearing on her work, can you sketch out some sort of arc there? Yes, well, the 19th century, and she's a 19th century writer, is, of course, a period of a lot of social and political movement in France, and in details were her. And Saund, in fact, lives through several regimes, because when she is born, Napoleon has.

just declared himself emperor. And then there is the overthrow of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy. And then there is another revolution and the beginning of a more constitutional monarchy with the July monarchy. And then another revolution in 1848. And by this stage, she is a participant

in political ideas at that time. Where did she get those ideas from? Well, her education was very complete, as well as her grandmother's influence and large library and her grandmother's own culture. She was an intellectual, a very cultivated woman. Sond, the little Oro, also had a tutor who combined academic prowess with teaching her how to ride,

and she would also have been taught how to run an estate of farms, how to be a good landowner and look after that sort of structure. So she had this very complete education, and she was a great reader, and she loved philosophy, which means that nothing in the way of becoming a writer is surprising after all that. but also she social life at the time

of course, unlike today, happens in homes and in places of hospitality, visits, dinners, conversations, and she would have had conversations as soon as she reached even young adulthood with very many important thinkers of the time and became one herself.

When it comes to 1848, I'm jumping ahead of it, she would have been in contact with people like Pierre Lohue, who is supposed to have coined the term socialism and socialist a priest called Felicit de la Menue, with whom she exchanged greatly. And I'm sure the influence was mutual, but certainly she was influenced by these thinkers. It should be said that socialism would appear very mild to us today. It's really what we would call basically just society

and human rights. It wasn't very extreme. But we have to remember that at the time, it was very extreme. The 19th century in France is more or less oscillating, speaking broadly, between some form of monarchy and some form of republic. Not all the same in their ideas, but some progress being made. And a number of people were thinking the poor should be looked after. They shouldn't be left to die in the street. It shouldn't depend on charity, volunteer charity, including by the churches, that the citizens should have some say in the government.

I suppose a quick way of saying it would be that the ideals of the French Revolution before it fell into violence and extremity. were still being fought over. People were still trying to achieve them and some thought in 1830 this would happen. Some thought in 1848 this would happen. And...

Sorry, sir. Yeah, Sons' involvement in 1848 was quite strong as a journalist. We have jumped ahead of it. Yes, we have done. So I'd like to go back a bit. She left her husband after 10 years, which was an extraordinary thing to do

and she really did leave him. What happened then? Well, she really did leave him, left in, went to try to... Yes, she went to Paris to... We took her children and tried to make a life for herself. Yes, she went, first of all, they sort of split up by agreement because of the huge differences there had been.

She found his behaviour intolerable. He was prepared to put up with this. It would appear, I mean, it's difficult to judge somebody else's private life. I wouldn't want to make two strong assertions. But it would appear that he was prepared to agree to some form of separation because he hoped still to enjoy the benefit of her inherited fortune. Which it has to be said in retrospect must have been one of the reasons for the marriage on his side.

She was a rich heiress and she had many other more real attractions but people weren't in this. So she goes to Paris and later takes the children once she's found a set up for herself and she meets people from the Behi from her region and sometimes they're the same people, writers

people involved in the thinking of the day. But broadly speaking it was very difficult for a woman to leave a marriage and take with her money and her children. I'm skipping over different kinds of versions of the marital regime but they're all unfavourable to the wife.

Yes, and she did and she landed in Paris with her two children. Nigel Harkness, the first novel she wrote on her own, because she wrote novels alongside her man called, for to start with, was Indiana in 1832. What was striking about that? So Indiana was widely regarded as representing the pinnacle of the modern novel when it came out, as you say, in 1832.

and this was very striking because this was Sons' first novel. It didn't appear as if it was the first novel of someone. It didn't appear as it was a novel of an inexperienced writer. It was the novel that launched the literary persona, Georges Sond. As you said, she'd written a novel with Jules Sando, and they'd published it under the pseudonym J. Sond. And when she came to write another novel on her own, clearly the publisher wanted to keep the illusion or keep the name Sond,

but J. Sondre didn't want it to be published as J.Sond, because he had nothing to do with it. So she just changed the initial J to G, and thereby we have Jostend as a literary phenomenon. And what was it about, what was its central structure, and why did that seize the imagination of a large reading and critical public? So I think when I mentioned earlier, this sense of it representing the pinnacle of the modern novel. It combined documentary, yes, documentary drama, it had history, it had politics and it had passion. It was a novel of adultry. So what was it about basically? What was the story, sorry, that's easy to me.

It's the novel of a young woman, Andiana, who's married to an older man, Colonel Del Mau. It's an unhappy marriage. He is a tyrant husband. And it tells the story how she essentially seeks liberation from that marriage through a series of love affairs with other men before she settles on the companion with whom she can spend the rest of her life. And it's very much a companion then rather than a husband. Would it be true, probably rather crude,

but would it be true enough to say that her heroine behaved like men had behaved before? Her heroine sought freedom. Her heroine has actually is really quite representative, I think, of two poles in two ways, I suppose, in which women could think about their lives at the time actually. So Anjana is very interesting as a character because she has these moments of rebellion, of outright rebellion, where she asserts her freedom. And she, one of the most quoted passages of the novel, is where she, challenges her husband, comparing marriage to slavery, and saying that although he can

enchain her as husband, he can't control her mind. But equally, on the other side of that, you know, that sense of agency is counterbalanced by a sense in which she can't think of her life actually as separate from a man. So every time she seeks freedom or liberation, it is in the context of there being a man. Her dream. in this loveless marriage is always framed as a Messiah will come, a man will come and take me away from this. Towards the end of the novel, that does shift

and she's really, the conclusion of the novel, I think, really is a moment of fulfillment for Andiana very much on her terms rather than in subservience to a man. What interested the readers take in the author of this book, novel? Readers were very interested in the authorship of this novel. We can really only judge that through some of the literary reviews of the time. But there was a lot of speculation as to the identity of the person behind the G-Son. How long did it take them to clock that it was a woman?

I think that was pretty much known by the end of the year, if not before that. One critic, for instance, Gustave Planch, really focuses in on this question in his review because the narrator of the novel, the narrator of the novel is male. Saint speaks through this male voice, and we know this because at various points, he makes references to we men, for instance. And he uses generalisations about women,

some of which are fairly misogynistic, referring to saying, woman is idiotic by nature. And Gustave Planch speculated that a man would never have dared to write that, so it had to be a woman behind the male voice. Thank you very much. If she adopted had this name,

you might as well tell the listeners her real name. She was born in Monten, Lucy L'Hlorard DuPain de Francé, and she became by marriage Baron du DeVant, and then she adopted the name George Sonde. And interestingly, I noticed in the French archives that when her daughter gets married, the French formal fair par, the formal invitation,

gives all the family names of Sonde, whereas when she dies, they've gone back to Du DeVant. Right. So that's subtle, that's not a question. Belinda, did she write about the life she lived or the life she wanted to live or both? Can you give us one of two examples? Well, I think that's one of the most interesting questions, because all writers obviously draw on their own experience.

All writers write to some degree autobiographically. But writers also write to make sense of that experience. It's not a simple transcription of experience into writing. and so it's very clear in Andyana, for example, that that relationship with the rather brutal husband is likely to have been based on her own experience. But more interesting than drawing on her own life, although, of course, reading about Chopin, for example,

in the novel that she wrote about her experience. Later on, so let's take to this one. So I think more interesting than drawing on her own life is the way in which she actually experimented in her writings with possible futures. So in a short story that she wrote, for example, the year after, Indiana, called La Marquise, it's a story about a 16-year-old who's married to a brutal man and he dies, she becomes frigid as a function of the brutality of their early sexual relationship. And she goes to the theatre, and she has to go to the theatre dressed as a man,

because, of course, you couldn't go unaccompanied as a woman. So she dresses as a man. And she falls in love with a man on the stage, who is Lely-O. And suddenly realizes that her own sort of erotic self has been stimulated by watching this man. And the two meet, and it's obviously sexually very ambiguous this moment. But she talks about the way in which her soul comes alive, as she watches this young man on the stage.

And this is precisely what happens a year later when she falls in love with Marie Dorval. There she is in the theatre. She sees Marie Dorval on the stage. And what is described is very much like the story that she'd actually written the year before. In other words, not only does she draw on the life lived and reworked into fiction,

but she also thinks, well, what sort of lives might lie ahead of me? Can I explore possibilities for my life in my fiction and then live them out? So she's talking about two different aspects of her sexuality. Is that right? Well, she never really believed in sexuality in the... I was treading with great care on that way. I almost withdrew it at the last moment. Well, she said, for example, that she thought Solange, her daughter was much more boyish than her son, Maurice,

and described Maurice as much more feminine. So she never really saw it as these sort of two possibilities. And of course, as a writer, I mean, a lot's made of her cross-dressing, for example. Well, to some degree, she wore trousers to ride, as most girls did in the country. So that wasn't really very exceptional. And she also dressed as a man to pass unnoticed in the street, to gather material as a novelist. As a woman, you couldn't walk out alone.

So it wasn't so much that she was playing. with gender as this was a practical necessity. But of course that didn't mean she didn't have some interesting encounters with women, one when she was outriding when she met a young woman on horseback who assumed she was a man. But again, it's all grist to the mill of a writer. I don't need to be defended her. I just want to explain. Is that what she did?

It's fine if she was interested in women as well as in men. I just want to know what's right about the statement I've fumbled to make. Well, I don't think there was only great ambiguity about her sexuality, but maybe that's not what you were suggesting. No, no, I'm not. I'm longing for clarity. She enjoyed experimenting with everything. Oh, that's a start. And she certainly experimented in terms of relationship.

I mean, she had really some extraordinarily sadistic relationships with men, which she clearly enjoyed. In one instance, talking about the stigmata, on her hands left by a violent sexual encounter. So she was a great experimenter. And so what, and an inventor of herself and a reinventer of herself. Thank you very much.

Angela, Angela Ryan, what rights did she demand in her writing in her life? Let's take to her right for women that they didn't have. We have to remember that at this time, a married woman particularly, becomes effectively a child again in the eyes of society, can make no legal decisions, sign nothing, etc. We should remember, of course, that even into the 20th century,

many women couldn't get mortgages or open bank accounts without signatures. So in a lesser form, this continued until relatively recently. But certainly at the time of her adulthood and her young adulthood, as a married woman, one has absolutely no freedom. She may have thought that by getting married she could free herself from the bond to her mother. But in fact, so freedom in marriage, or rather freedom for women, but more especially married women, would have been a huge preoccupation in a way that it's difficult to imagine today, really. She pressed for that very hard, but she didn't press for votes

for women. It's not quite as simple as that, I think, although there are different opinions on this, as, you know, quote hominé's tut, tut, and nancy. She didn't advocate giving women the vote simplicitre unless they were also given education and freedom. And actually this argument was made later by perfectly liberally minded people. If you give women the vote without education and freedom, they will find themselves pressure to vote the way their husbands want, and that would suit some political parties and not others. So I don't think Sond thought women shouldn't be full citizens.

She thought that simply granting the vote wasn't the right way to go about it. She also, it should be said too, that she wrote and spoke a great deal about freedoms in a more general way. For example, she writes very movingly about the fate of a young girl who is in an orphanage and the system is that you will be kept there and taught some sort of skill, for example, needle, being a needlewoman. But this girl was what was called sampler and we know the psychiatry of the time would have barbaric compared to today when it isn't even perfect now. She probably had this or that difficulty. But this girl, because she couldn't get a job as a needlewoman was simply put out

and attacked and victimised in the countryside and Sond wrote very, very forcefully in effectively a pamphlet about how this really shouldn't happen that people were entitled to some sort of care in the community as a right. So freedom for women, for married women, for the poor, for people in considered minor levels of society. For example, she always referred to her domestic help as Jean-Damele not as domestic meaning servants.

She spoke and wrote in great depth for political freedom for citizens, especially around the time of the 1848 revolution. Can I come across there now for a moment? Yes, I think one of the things that really concerned her was really bound up with copyright. And at one point, her ownership of some of her early work was infringed by the Society of Authors. And it was only with her husband's permission that she could have. actually engage in a legal battle. And that she saw as a quite extraordinary injustice

because it really meant that she didn't even own what she herself had written. Can you give some more examples, Nigel? The way she resisted the constraints imposed on her as a writer as a woman. I think we can pick up some of the ideas, obviously, that are implicit in the name here. I referred to the fact that she takes on the pseudonym Jean-Sand.

One of the things that we can note about that The spelling of Georges is the English spelling of Georges, not the French spelling. There's no S on the end of it, the mistake my students often make. But it signals, therefore, it can be seen as adopting a masculine male pseudonym, but it can also be seen as signaling not quite fully masculine or fully feminine. The name in French kind of gives us this sense of sameness and difference within masculine and feminine. And I think that obtains right the way through her life. If we look at, for instance, the way in which Flaubert addresses her, he addresses her as ch'ermainter, dear master. But he makes

the adjective dear in French agree in the feminine. What did she feel she could not do as a woman, or would not be allowed to do as a woman writer? Was it much, did it amount to anything? I'm not sure that there was very much she felt she couldn't do as a woman writer. I mean, I think certainly if we look at the panoply of heroines in her fiction, we've got the complex and slightly contradictory Andeanna of the first novel caught between kind of conventions, conventional understandings of femininity and a desire for freedom. We've got the heroine of her third novel, Lillia,

who speaks very openly about questions of desire, sexual pleasure and frigidity. and speaks very openly about her inability to experience sexual pleasure in a relationship. And in a relationship with a man where the man is the one who exercises power and control, you've got the same kinds of independent women advocating for the right to education, the right to their own autonomy within marriage and their own equality within marriage, in marriage right the way through to the end of her life effectively when she's still writing in the 1860s and 1870s. Belinda, do you assume what to come in?

I think the breakthrough moment in some ways is when she gets a very large advance for her autobiography, the story of my life. And at that point, I think the advance was 130,000 francs. Now, to put that in perspective, Fleurber's advance for Madame Bouvare, or payment for Madame Bouvare, was about 800. So 800 versus 130,000.

She bought her freedom by becoming an exceptional writer and being very cany in lots of ways about her public image. I think something we can say about your son, is that she did overtly what other people did covertly. You were saying she did what men did, yes, and she also did what some other women did, openly. For example, and this will make us smile today, for contradictory reasons, she smoked in public.

Women, ladies, did not smoke in public, and indeed in more recent times, but she did, and we are told that Catherine de medicis in a much earlier period smoked as Queen Consort of France, but it's not in the portraits, it wasn't seen. Jorson did it openly. I personally have the impression that the wearing men's clothes was mainly, as Belinda said, for practical reasons, forgetting about, and saving money on voluilion. luminous petticoats that needed laundering rather than. But having said that, her claim to freedom from marriage, her claim to getting her own money back,

owning the fruits of her earnings, were things that men did and that were not acceptable in women. And these are the innovations, I suppose, that she made. Can we come to her relationship, the 10-year relationship, is Schoen-Bel. Yes, again, it's a relationship that I think's been cast in films, particularly, in a slightly misleading way. We'll put the record straight then.

So I think they were drawn to each other because they actually understood each other's art very much better than a lot of their contemporaries. She had a real insight into what he was trying to do as a composer. And they talked a great deal about their work. So when they were in Mallorca, he was composing the preludes, for example. And I think she made some comment about how she could hear the rain and that this was clearly a sort of mimetic device.

and he was furious because he didn't think he was trying to imitate the sound of rain in his composition. And they then went on to have really quite a technical discussion about this. So she understood a lot about his composition and what he was trying to do and how he drew on Polish folk traditions. And of course, Georges Saint believed very much in the validity and interest of oral traditions, the stories she'd heard as a child, which she drew on in her. her writing. And when Schopen was at Noor and there was music being played, particularly the bagpipes, he would rush out and transcribe the tunes. Nigel, she became well-known, we're halfway there now,

for her rural novels. Why did they, why were they so well thought of and acclaimed and even referred to in Proust and read there? So the way you go. The Proust reference gives you one reason for which these novels were one. known and widely read in that the episode in Proust, where the grandmother wants to give him, give the young narrator some novels. The initial set of novels includes the scandalous ones, Andiana, Lelia, and of course there we are then,

the novels which are deemed suitable for the narrator as a child are the persons' rustic novels, the pastoral novels. So it feeds into this sense of this being kind of children's, literature, yeah. Can I just ask, is she sitting down, because she wrote 17 novels, she wrote of journalism, a lot of article, is she saying this will do well on the market, there's nothing more with that, some great writers of Britain, to do well on the market, or did she think, I really want to write about this because it's in my bones or in my background and so on. What was going on? I think it's always about what was inside her, what she wanted to

express. She wrote, as you said, voluminously and very fast. One of the pastoral novels was completed, I think within about four days. I'm trying to remember the La Petit Fadette. It was written very quickly. But to go back to what makes those rustic novels, I think, so important. Beyond the fact that they are perceived to be suitable for children to read

is precisely what I think Belinda was referring to earlier, that oral tradition of the beri, these are stories which are framed absolutely, within that context. It is a narrator, a storyteller from the Berri, who is telling these stories of an evening to a group of peasants. And Sond recreates that and transcribes that. So what we have, the framing of these novels, is a very interesting piece of translation, translation of the culture of the Berri and translation of the language of the Berri in a way that actually, I think, shifts the dynamic of the narration away from a Parisian talking about the Berri

to a narrative voice which actually has to mediate between the peasant and the Parisian reader. So bluntly, why were they so successful, Blender? Well, and if I could just pick up on what Nigel said about Francois Le Champi. A Chompie was a child that was born in the fields and abandoned, and one of the novels is about such a child. and it's this novel that has the central part at the beginning of Proust's in Search of Lost Nheim. And it's not actually, I mean, maybe you didn't say this because it's obvious, but it's not actually a safe story at all,

because it's a story about a quasi-incestious relationship. And that's why it has the pivotal place that it has in Proust's story, because it happens at a moment when he's longing for his mother and for closeness with his mother in opposition to some degree with the farm, And so although Sandoz presents it as an innocent country tale, it's actually a very subversive story. Much darker indeed. Sorry, but can one of you tell me why it was so very popular? Is there any one reason or is she got a big reputation then and people bought whatever she wrote?

Do you mean her work in general? These rural novels? Well, all her work was popular. It was very often published, first of all, in periodical form. So coming out in various reviews, which people... got in their homes and passed round. The two that I've worked on, Anévae de Majok, and also Le Beaumussu de Bordeaux-Huie,

which is a historical novel during the Wars of Religion, came out in this periodical format and were very accessible in families. She was at the same time, it isn't a dichotomy. She was very popular with the reading public, which, of course, at that time isn't as many people as now in society, and she was also very celebrated by the great writers and artists of her day. Yes, we must bring that in, in Stondow. Yes, she conversed to these people,

entertain them, met them, met them. They greatly admired her. Flaubert, as Belinda has brought out, had a huge personal admiration for her, and he was the stylist of French literature. She writes, by the way, a very elegant, plain elegant French, excellently written, balance of sentences,

the geometry of the paragraph, etc. She is a very, very literate writer without pretension. How come she... There was a feeling, there is a feeling now that if you write as much as she wrote, by definition, you can't be much good. So why does she want to write... That seems to be one of the going things, isn't it?

Yes. Do you concur with that? Not at all. No, good. Nor do I would have been she as it happens. But it is true that it's very often said, if she wrote that much, it can't be all good, or it can't be all hers.

That's very often an attribute of criticism of female artists, what she helped by her husband, etc. She had a very good education. She wrote in a large variety of styles, and she covered extremely well a very wide range of subjects and types of writing. We haven't mentioned theatre and as a recent grandmother myself

I'm very fond of her stories she wrote for her grandchildren. So she writes in all these genres as well as journalism and political writing and extremely well. She just was a very good writer. We should mention her work ethic. She wrote far into the night

because she was a very busy woman and then during the day she entertained her friends and overthawed the kitchen and minded the grandchildren and managed the estate. She worked very, very long hours. And her readership in both ways

appreciated this because as I say, she was very widely read, but also very admired. And she made money. It should be said, too, that she did consider her public. I mean, that's not a dichotomy either, as you suggested. For example, the book I'm working on now, The Fine Gentleman of Baudouet, is set in the 17th century because her preceding novel criticised the church, La Daniele.

And her editor said, could you tone it down a bit? Speaking in French, as was his habit, as P.G. Woodhouse says. And the next novel then, she set her criticisms of society, social justice, religious intolerance, oppression of women, oppression of children, oppression of the poor. She set it in an earlier period. So she manages to critique the society she's living in, but will avoid controversy

because technically it's set in the reign of Louis Xerth. So she was a clever writer who read her public well too. Nigel. How did her political views develop? When did she become disillusioned? I'm not sure she ever becomes disillusioned. What about 1848? Well, 1848 is often seen as the watershed moment in Saint's political career.

Angela has already referred to Saint's sense of the rights of, not just women, but the rights of the people, the importance that she accorded to socialism. So she was immensely disappointed in 1848. What disappointed her? Well, it was the fact that the cause that she was espousing, the repulsing, the repatriate, public, really, it just did not happen in the way that she hoped it. She was very much involved with the provisional government. She established a political review.

She wrote the bulletin for the French Interior Minister, but it's really the June days that disappoint her, and she retires to the country after that. But I don't think she really, she never, her political views don't really change after that. She has disillusioned for a moment. And we see this, I suppose what we see again is in 1870, 1871 with the commune, where it is a workers' revolution in Paris.

We have a radical socialist government within Paris. Someone was enormously critical of that. And she was critical of it because she thought it jeopardized the Republic, the Third Republic, which was just starting to take root there. was too radical. And so she is staying true, I think, all the way through her life to some of those socialist ideals which are present from, really from the 1830s onwards. She wasn't disillusioned by the ferocity and the, let's call it, barbarity of what was happening in Paris in 1848 and again later. Well, yes, and also it was briefly followed by the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon,

becoming Napoleon III and emperor, at which point she pled with him, had audiences with him, and wrote to him pleading for an amnesty and clemency, especially for people like Victoria Gou, who was in fact exiled. So this would be a reason why she would, I think, as Nigel says and Belinda suggested earlier, I don't think she abandons her ideals, but I think she takes these ideals into her writing and expresses her views for the hopeful future of humanity

and the abuses that need to be got beyond in her fiction and in her theatre, rather than in militantism. Yeah, I think she was deeply shocked by the mob. I don't think she'd ever witness what happens when an angry crowd spars each other on to sort of extraordinary violence. And the distance between the ideals that she believed in

and the ideals she thought those who were on her side believed in. And then the reality of mob violence shocked her profoundly. That's why I meant by disillusion, perhaps he was the wrong wound. Because she sort more or less left Paris and went into the country. And for a lot of years, 20 odd years, she stayed out of time. of it in that sense. Well then, yeah, then I think she tried to exert her influence and go on propagating certain sorts of political.

Yes, absolutely. But the direct action when she actually witnessed it was something she just did not want to be barren. She was also very worried about the commune, which again was referenced in this program a few weeks ago, the siege of Paris, etc. She writes, she had no sympathy, it would appear with the communeer. She didn't like the taking of hostages, the executions. Now, I'm going to ask you two important questions with very little time left.

First of all, what influence did she have? And secondly, what is her status now as a writer? So if we go that way first, as briefly as you can, I'm sorry to say this sort of thing, but I think it's worth asking. I think she had an enormous influence on women writers of the later 19th century. We can see a trajectory there

between some of the heroines that we find in science fiction and the kind of the type of the femme novelle that we would see. in the fiction of Marcel Tiener, even through to a writer such as Colette. She had enormous influence as well, I would say, on Flaubert. We know that Anker Sampre was written for or with Sond in mind.

So I think that those two things are clear. Why is she, what's her status today? I think it is a slightly ambiguous status. Can we switch over now? Okay. Can you take that off? And I think that's absolutely right. I think her status today is quite.

problematic. I mean, I would say that with the exception of some excellent translations of her work, I don't know that we're altogether well served by some of the English translations. Yeah, I agree. And this can be very problematic, I think, with French writers, because then the English-speaking world decides that the writer isn't really as engaging as they supposed, when sometimes it may be the fault of the translator. So in the English-speaking world, I think that plays a part. otherwise in France I mean she's certainly a very respected writer

theses are still being written on her and so I think she's she's held her own in many ways it has been said that in the English-speaking world she's more known for her life and in the French speaking world more known for her work that's a bit simplistic but there's something in that in recent years however thanks to Champillon

publishing the complete works etc for more serious scholarly attention is being paid even than before and I think we could also mention the writers who said they were influenced by her. There is Toganyeth. There is Walt Whitman. Elizabeth Bart Broning wrote two poems to her. And when I re-read Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey,

I found a passage that is a quotation from Sons' travel writing, though not attributed. I think her influence was very wide amongst people who weren't always aware of the fact. I think that's right. I think the one thing I would add to that in terms of her status in France at the moment and that ambiguous status is the fact that in the French, if you really enter the French canon, you get published by La Pléad in the Pleiade collection. It is sort of the collection that publishes the great and the good.

Sond, for many years, only had two, her autobiography, effectively, in the playad in two volumes, was done in 1970, 1971. It's only last year, 2019, that 15 of her novels have now been published by La Playaad. And I think that suggests just that she is catching up, perhaps, eventually, and that crining of this fantastic Roman writer is now complete. Very good. Well, I hope she's listening in.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Nigel Harkness, Belinda Jack and Angela Ryan. Next week, it's the Battle of Tudorburg Forest when Germanic tribes destroyed three Roman legions in the time of Augustus. It set the limits to the Roman Empire and later inspired German nationalism. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. We haven't mentioned her generosity, specifically enough, though it had been a vote a bit. She was extremely generous with hospitality, and at the time, as I said, that is how people met. So she entertained artists, writers, politicians, all kinds of people in her home, and very generously, and had them to stay. This was extremely enabling for poor young writers, musicians, etc. She advised and listened and was very generous with her emotional support to the people whom she was closely involved with, but also in general.

She was apparently a very good cook. Her cookbook has recently been collated and published, and she was famous for making excellent jam, which she distributed to the poor people of the neighbourhood. She also went around with tonics, potions that her grandmother had taught her to make when her tenants were sick. She was a very generous landowner. I was just going to add that for those of us who aren't hugely sociable

she did after a while feel quite overwhelmed by the number of visitors that she had indeed to cook for in which she did very generously a problem not having a country house it becomes a hotel well so what she did and it's a useful tip this was when she was when she was when she was in love with Monseau her last lover who was an engraver and it was a very peaceful easy autumnal relationship should we say She bought a lovely little place called Gargilles, tiny little place, which was a couple of hours ride from Noon,

which was obviously just very carefully calculated, so she felt that they'd got away and that other people couldn't come and get them too easily. And that's where the two of them would escape. He would go off and collect butterflies, and she would write. I think the one thing that we probably haven't talked a lot about, and I think some of it quite rightly, we haven't dwelt on the kind of fact that she dressed as a man that period in her life.

And we've talked a little bit about it. But I think the thing that I think is also really important in Saint, is that assumption of a masculine identity and a male voice within the novels. And it's very striking. Angela will know this better than any of us in a winter in Mayorka. In the French text, it's very clear that it's a man. speaking about... At the same time, the positioning is more complex

in that I've studied this from manuscript to last edition, as Nigel has, for Indiana for the critical edition. She does use jeux and it is marked by the masculine something like 25 times in the whole text of 300 old pages.

But that's actually very little because she uses new much more often and that's an undifferentiated masculine plural. So she avoids. There is a masculine voice but it's tempered. I'm coming to a point here as quickly as I can,

whereas in one short section where she's described a young woman called Pehika whom she met, the feminine is marked 17 times in just a few paragraphs. So I see this avoidance of using the masculine jeet too much as a choice.

Every writer makes a choice. They begin with the blank page. I think, and she says this in Lettre d'An Voyager, I think she was striving for a human voice. We must remember that in the past, men and women,

are not men and women today, they're completely different socioeconomic beings in a horrible, divided way and opposed way. I think she was striving towards today's view that people are humans. There are differences, yes, but I think she says, I want in my travel writing, I don't want people to be curious about me and anecdotes about me. I want there to be a voice describing what was experienced

and getting across the philosophy of travel and of meeting other people. I think it speaks to that constant return to those questions about gender identity within her life and within her work. You can see it. Belinda has already mentioned the fact that one of the pastoral, not of François-L champ, is far from an innocent country tale. One of the others, La Petite Fadette, explores certainly the relationship between,

explores principally the relationship between two male twins, and originally it was going to be called Les Besant, which is Berichon for twins. You've got one twin who, whose trajectory in life absolutely follows the social script of masculinity. He works, he faces trials, he overcomes them, he demonstrates courage, energy, bravery, etc. You've got another twin who actually doesn't break away from the domestic, the maternal, remains fixated on his other male twin in a kind of slightly problematic way

and is very jealous of that, twins' ultimate love object, Fadette. And I think that just speaks to Sons' interest in the different types of masculinity that there are in the same way that she explores all sorts of feminine identities and feminine ways, female ways of being in the world. I think it's something that can get lost, I suppose, as we think about Sond as really the cross-dressing woman writer in that kind of, you know, kind of simple. but certainly still prevalent idea, I think, around who she was and what she wrote.

I was just going to say that I think that, like all great writers, she believed in ambiguities and paradoxes. She didn't think that identity was straightforward. She didn't think that life was straightforward. And one of the interesting things about Andeana, her first solo novel, is that in effect it has two endings. It ends with what seems to be a joint suicide of Andyana and Ralph, her lover. But then there's a sort of second ending. And this is intrigued.

And they're resurrected? Well, it's intriguing. I mean, it could be read as a kind of strange, mystical resurrection. But, I mean, I've always thought that there were two endings there. I mean, it's the French lieutenant's woman, isn't it, that has the seven endings, which really made multiple endings fashionable, she was doing it in the 19th century, and that's because she wanted people to realize

that not only could life take you in different directions, but actually a novel could too. And part of what she was trying to do, unlike Fleurber, who was trying to write this perfect novel, she wanted people to think about their lives. She wanted to think about the possibilities of life. She wanted to say, look, if you can imagine another life, you might actually go on to live that life.

And so I think some of the ambiguities, whether it's about gender, whether it's about the form of the novel, are very much bound up with this conviction that writing mattered in terms of how we live. And it was also about experimentation, wasn't it? I think we've touched on that, that Sond did experiment. I mean, I think the first novel critics have, contemporary critics have talked about that as a novel about writing, as a novel about entry into literature.

Because actually those two endings, there's possible third ending actually but those two endings the one that's on suicide is almost the classic literary arc isn't it? You've got the woman who's unhappy in marriage has a love affair with one man

is let down repeatedly by that man then finds another love object but they can't be happy together in this life the only way out is death they will be together in another life and then the conclusion gives a different kind of literary arc which is actually everything that Andiana has wished for or dreamt of in the novel comes to fruition in the conclusion.

Except she has no voice because everything is told by another voice. Her experiences are fairly, I mean, reading Nigel's research, her experiences are narrated from her point of view, though you're quite right it is in a masculine voice. She was offered the legion d'onet, actually, but modestly turned it down. No particular reason. Just said, oh, I don't think.

The minister who approached her, she said, oh, no, don't do that. Also, she was a very talented artist, a very talented watercolist, and much of her work is available. Some of it is being sold today at auction houses like, this speed of writing got you into trouble with persons like Bodleuze.

Well, now, that's... But he's a nasty piece of work, wasn't really, yeah. Boisleire is a very great poet. I love many various poems. It has to be... To say Budler is lovely, something on, we're tracked. He writes this in Moncour Mizanou. Brilliant.

He writes this in Moncourer Mizanu, which has a sort of a diary format, it's sort of thoughts that are written down. And I don't look on it as literary criticism, to be fair to Baudelaire. I think it's just a bit of spleen. Writers are not always utterly generous about other writers. Not all the time, just most of the time.

Revelations we get on in our time. No, just most of the time. No, I think Baudelaire was being, was begrudgery. I'm avoiding using another word beginning with B since this is radio four. The same is true of Barbados d'Orvilli, but most of the writers of her day, as we've heard,

and as we see in the work of the people here, praised her to the skies, thought extremely highly of her, and the emperor, as I said, offered her the legion. And she translated very well, in the sense that you pointed out to the frailty of some of the translations, but in English translation,

so I read, she sold more than Balzac more than Victor Hugo. And some of the translations are fine. We must all set about doing more translation. Yes, quite. But I think your point earlier, about how there are some novels available in translation, but not that many easily available in a kind of paperback form

or to download onto some sort of electronic reading device. And I think that must at some point be a hindrance in terms of people being able to access to her work. And the only translation of a winter in meorker, which was my first songbook, the one I wrote about, I mean, is by Robert Braves, whom I otherwise greatly admire, I dedicated my first doctoral thesis to him,

but in this respect, I'm afraid, he added very mean-minded annotations. So I would like the listener to read, but I can't recommend that translation. I must do another one. It's as I mentioned the fact that she was... She's very nasty about my ochrelyneut, isn't she... Well, you know, if she'd visited Ireland at that time.

Or if she'd visited parts of Britain at that time. She would have found that landowners weren't all managing very well either. I think she was probably right. They didn't go down well, that's quite true. But then travel writing often doesn't. Travel writers often assume that the people where they travel won't read the book, you see, but then sometimes they do.

In terms of discrimination against women, I mean, surely the fact that the Pontiarton in Paris is where the great French are buried. And there have been various campaigns to move women into the Pontiard. And there are now some women, but there isn't a single woman writer that there's been a campaign for... Simondé Montiard-Bouin. No, Simovoire.

No women writers. And I think, as I think you said earlier, the problem is that there's so much interest in women's lives that this interferes in some way with the literary. Too much and the wrong kind. It's often prurient to association of France and sex and so on. It's often very silly that her private life is exaggerated. You should forgive my mass media reference,

if she were in sex in the city, she would be Carrie, the writer, a possibly bit of Miranda with her preoccupation with justice and indeed Charlotte. She was still hospitable. I think this is getting part of her at her. I apologise. Producers, pouring the ground to come in and make an offer. If I may add one point, she once had to go to her husband

to get her daughter back when he kidnapped her. And the prefe who helped her was called Oseman. And later, as Baron Oseman, he was responsible for reorganising Paris. Really? Yes. Does he know what tea or coffee? I'd love a coffee, please. Coffee, tea, would be lovely, Simon.

Tea, please. in our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson BBC Sands Music, Radio, Podcasts Anna Delvey was due to inherit $67 million. I'm so excited about what the future holds. She secured huge investments for a project in New York. She was very confident in her words. And yet, it was all a lie.

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