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Reviewed by:
  • Œuvres complètes 1829–1831: George Sand avant ‘Indiana’, and: Œuvres complètes 1832: ‘Indiana’, and: Œuvres complètes 1836–1837: ‘Simon’
  • Nigel Harkness
George Sand: Œuvres complètes 1829–1831: George Sand avant ‘Indiana’. 2 vols. Edited by Yves Chastagnaret. (Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, 103). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. 1648 pp. Hb €311.00.
George Sand: Œuvres complètes 1832: ‘Indiana’. Edited by Brigitte Diaz. ‘Valentine’. Edited by Damien Zanone. (Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, 105). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. 745 pp. Hb €127.00.
George Sand: Œuvres complètes 1836–1837: ‘Simon’. Edited by Catherine MarietteClot. ‘Lettres d’un voyageur’. Edited by Suzel Esquier. (Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, 115). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010. 674 pp. Hb €115.00.

That it has taken over 130 years since Sand’s death in 1876 to see the first scholarly edition of her complete works begin to appear says as much about the monumentality of the undertaking as about the author’s still problematic status within the canon of nineteenth-century French literature. Thus while her correspondence has been published in twenty-six volumes by Garnier, and her Œuvres autobiographiques have appeared in the Pléiade (both of these edited by Georges Lubin), the last edition of her Œuvres complètes dates to the latter half of the nineteenth century (the Édition Lévy was begun in 1856–57 and ran to some 109 volumes, the last of which was published in the early twentieth century). Since then many modern editions of individual novels have appeared, often with excellent critical apparatus (in particular the thirty titles published in the 1980s and 1990s by the Éditions de l’Aurore), but a substantial proportion of Sand’s work has remained accessible only in the original editions. This new edition is thus all the more welcome for being so long overdue. In a ‘Présentation générale’ Béatrice Didier sets out the principles that govern the edition as a whole. The intention is that it will cover all of Sand’s work, excluding her correspondence, and will be organized on broadly chronological lines: novelistic works will be grouped into volumes by year of original publication, but separate volumes will be devoted to Sand’s short stories, theatre, journalistic production, and autobiography. In each case, the text used is the final version reviewed by the author. The accompanying scholarly apparatus includes explanatory notes as well as an exhaustive list of variants taken from the manuscript (where available), from press publication in serial form (where relevant), and from earlier editions of the novel. In addition, each edition is complemented by a dossier of material relating to the work’s reception, which includes a wide range of articles from the contemporary press, often given in their entirety.

If one of the aims is to bring a ‘new’ Sand to scholarly attention, then the first two publications under review make a substantial contribution towards achieving this objective, as they group together for the first time all of Sand’s writing between 1829 and the appearance of her first single-authored novel, Indiana, in 1832. This includes a number of unpublished texts — such as La Marraine and Jehan Cauvin — as well as complete editions of texts that had previously been published only in incomplete form (such as Histoire du rêveur). In his Introduction, Yves Chastagnaret gives the most detailed and extensively documented analysis to date of Sand’s emergence on the literary scene. Particularly revealing here is the way in which these three years of intensive literary activity set up themes and subjects that will resonate through much of Sand’s subsequent work. While the focus on inequalities between men and women in society, the lack of correlation between love and marriage, and a focus on woman’s progressive conquest of her independence are perhaps unsurprising in works that have a strong autobiographical inflection, other, less expected features emerge from these early works, including the significance of Italy and music, the influence of writers such as Sterne and Hoffmann, and the strong political dimension to the post-1830 novels, [End Page 250] in which the author’s...

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