George Sand and the Victorian World by Paul G. Blount (review)

GEORGE SAND AND THE VICTORIAN WORLD BY PAUL G. BLOUNT (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1979. 190 pp.) The extraordinary attraction of George Sand for nineteenth century English writers is a subject well worth closer attention; unfortunately , Paul G. Blount's George Sand and the Victorian World fails to explain, or even demonstrate, the dimensions of Sand's influence on so many mid-century poets and novelists across the channel, but rather settles for telling us that it was so. Coming on the heels of the similarly titled but much more searching George Sand and the Victorians by Patricia Thomson, it suffers from the impression of being too little and too late. Where Ms. Thomson, for example, examines in some detail the signs of Sandism in the Carlyles, the Brontes, Clough, Hardy, James, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Arnold, Blount deals with only the last three and then only superficially, describing their visits to their idol, or transcribing admiring comments from their letters , but passing over the effects of the hero-worship in their work. What he does show convincingly, by a review of English periodicals from the late 1830's, is that readers were taking the novels of Sand seriously, reading them avidly (usually in French) and, despite the "official" posture of moral outrage at their bold views on love, marriage, and politics, finding much to admire in their style, their nature descriptions , and their felt sense of heroic potential — preferringsuch romanticism to Balzac's realism. Writers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett, and even Arnold, found in her a role-model: thesensitiveartist. "dissatisfied with the age. yet determined, at the cost of great spiritual exertion, to thorw off despair and correct the evils of the world." Accepting this, the reader is led to believe that he will be given an analysis of how Sand's style and vision shaped or colored her admirers' writing, but instead is left with a sense of having been given an introduction to a study without the study itself. The bibliography, however, is extensive and thorough and will be useful to students of the Sand cult in England in tracing its development, and an appendix listing all the translations of Sand's novels available from 1847 to 1902 is a valuable addition. MARY ROSE SULLIVAN* •MARY ROSE SULLIVAN is Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver where she teaches Victorian literature courses; she is currently at work on an edition of the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW17] ...