Word: sanding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would be difficult to write a colorless biography of a woman who lived through and participated in the French Romantic movement and the countless restorations, republics and revolutions of her century. Barry begins Sand's story by briefly tracing her paternal family tree through several genreations of imaginative but debauched French and Polish aristocrats. He continues to place Sand within a historical framework, interweaving the events in her personal life with those of the literary and political worlds which surrounded, shaped and frequently angered...
Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, Sand was four when her father died. Barry dwells on Sand's early life, spent shuttling back and forth between her paternal grandmother's provincial estate and her mother's modest dwellings in Paris. The grandmother despised her "socially inferior" daughter-in-law and continually tried to separate her from the child. Sand later described herself as "the apple of discord" between the two rival mothers. Recalling one particularly violent separation from her mother, Sand wrote...
Throughout the book, Barry incorporates excerpts from Sand's own extensive autobiographic works and correspondence, without disrupting the flow of his own prose. Although the most memorable phrases in the book are Sand's, Barry too is highly readable. He deals with the potentially trite, unhappy childhood syndrome with just a dash of sentimental emotionalism, making the reader aware of the conflicts and complexes which shaped Sand without turning her life into a soapy saga...
...difficulty in Barry's early narrative is his feeble pseudo-Freudian attempt to explain Aurore Dupin's later adoption of a "male" personality--George Sand. Shortly before her father's death, she was dressed in a military uniform like her father's. "Not yet four, not yet George Sand, she had found her costume, that of a male," Barry writes. He describes several other childhood incidents: the secret games she played with her imaginary personal god (her first fictional creation), a male who was dressed as a female for special rites; her mourning grandmother calling...
...19th century France, young women from good families were raised with one goal in mind: to marry an eligible bachelor as quickly as possible. Sand married Casimir Dudevant and, according to Barry, spent the first few years of her marriage accepting the prevailing belief that when a wife's interests and needs differed from her husband's, she should sacrifice them. It was soon apparent that Dudevant, who liked to hunt, drink and sleep, had little in common with his intellectual bride. Initially Sand tried to be the perfect and obedient young wife and mother. The attempt did not last...