Indiana

This is not my favorite of Sand's that I have read to date, I would suggest the Devil's Pool or the Black City first, they are both shorter and much stronger. Not to say this is a bad bit of writing. Considering this is her first solo publishing venture it is very impressive. She still shows flashes of great insight, there are wonderful very quotable lines throughout the work. There are some very stricking scenes, actually... Read Full Review

George Sand's Indiana dramatizes and explores a wide variety of concerns in the nineteenth century with a brilliance one rarely finds in a first novel: Arranged marriages, what it means to be a Creole, colonialism and plantation profiteering, slavery, the beginnings of the deterioration of Old Europe, and the rise of the businessman. In terms of narrative style, this may be one of the most unique novels I have read. The... Read Full Review

Remembered mostly as the lover of Chopin and other celebrities of the nineteenth-century art world, Sand seems to be little-read these days. Yet in her day, she was the most respected woman writer in the world. This was her first solo effort. She collaborated on a previous novel, but referred to Indiana as her first. Some of the dialogue is decidedly overheated; real Harlequin Romance, bodice-ripper stuff. The story however,... Read Full Review

George Sand (nee Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) is the kind of name I've seen in the novels of more famous writers and in the footnotes of those novels, but her own suffer from a lack of visibility on the shelves of libraries and bookstores nowadays. Reading her early novel "Indiana," I see why she was so popular and influential in her era (admirers included George Eliot and Henry James); although she is not the equal of her... Read Full Review

I recently read a biography of George Sand and it stimulated an interest in reading some of her novels. It wasn't easy to find some, but I did manage to buy 'Indiana' and 'Mauprat' through a second-hand dealer. 'Indiana' is an interesting story of relationships especially between husbands and wives, men and women, nobility and commoners, family and strangers. The central marraige is uncharacteristic of modern Western society... Read Full Review