Best known work

• Indiana, 1832

Other well known work(s)

• Mauprat, 1837
• La Mare au Diable, 1846

Genres

• Biography / Autobiography
• Fiction - Novels
• Travel Writing / Translation
• Plays

Nom de plume

Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant

Social class

Upper class

Parental background

She had links with French and other European nobility on her father's side of the family.

At publication of best known work

• Age: 28
• Marital status: Separated
• Number of children: 2

Physical description

"She is a lady of gentlemanly manners (smokes a cigar and plays billiards,) and of a brilliant, masculine, and fierce style of beauty" (The North American and Daily Advertiser July 16 1842). She frequently dons male attire claiming it to be cheaper and more free than female dress. A somewhat scathing report in 1876 describes the aged Sands as thickset with a terrible hairstyle which "gives to her head, as seen from the front, a three-cornered appearance." She has a "large nose and heavy upper lip, large, masculine black eyes, small mouth and chin and a fair complexion now yellowing with age" (The Chicago Daily Tribune 12 Nov 1876).

Did you know?

Sand was notorious for her string of love affairs and took advantage of the more lenient French marriage laws to legally separate from her husband five years after she had left him, taking her two children with her.

Additional information

Justin McCarthy's 1870 essay on Sand is freely available on the Internet Archive.