Becoming George Sand

January 3, 2011
Maria Jameson, happy in her life as a professor, wife, and mother, finds her life upended when she begins an affair with a man she meets in a shabby Edinburgh, Scotland, bookshop. To help her make sense of her situation, Maria also embarks on a project researching the life and art of French novelist George Sand, who made a name for herself by walking around in trousers and taking beaucoup lovers. As the dry narrative advances, Brackenbury cuts back and forth between Maria's story and Sand's fateful trip to Majorca with Chopin, allowing Maria to discovers deep kinship with the writer, based on the conflicting desires of the female heart. Indeed, Maria's affair makes her life complete; she is happy with her lover and with her family, but the arrangement can't possibly last. While Brackenbury finds some nice parallels and a telling subplot regarding an ailing friend of Maria's, Maria's story of disconnection and reconnection with her family moves slowly, and the interludes in Sand's era often come off as stiff. Maria is deeply interested in her conundrum; readers will be much less so.

January 1, 2011

Parallel love stories link and illuminate the lives of two women, the 19th-century French writer George Sand and a Scottish academic writing about her.

English poet and novelist Brackenbury (Windstorm and Flood, 2007, etc.) brings striking sensitivity and lyrical phrasing to her tale of women struggling with their needs for passion and creativity. Dr. Maria Jameson, an academic in Edinburgh with a happy, if unspectacular, 20-year-long marriage to Edward and two children, also has a wonderful lover, an arrangement which suits her but is less satisfactory for Edward, who discovers the adultery when he and Maria are away visiting Majorca. Compelled by a sense of connection to the emancipated French woman, Maria is writing a book on Sand, who herself had many lovers, famously Chopin, with whom she made a difficult journey to Majorca. Later, after their relationship lost its passion, Sand enjoyed a lengthy correspondence with Flaubert, which Maria reads and values when Edward moves out and her affair ends: She begins to see work may be easier with the men absent. Events and her research bring her ever closer to identification with Sand and her sense of optimism, along with the understanding that "[w]hat matters is to live at the place where the heart connects with the world."

Slender and a little too neat, but a resonant meditation on love, literature and lived experience.

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