. there are various different things to be said. Very remarkable, indeed, was the immediate development of the literary faculty in this needy young woman who lived in cheap lodgings and looked for “employment”. She wrote as a bird sings; but unlike most birds, she found it unnecessary to indulge, by way of prelude, in twitterings and vocal exercises; she broke out at once with her full volume of expression.’1 Characterized on the basis of her remarkable achievement—Indiana literally launched Sand’s career overnight—as a ‘natural’ writer, Sand was by the same gesture assigned the second rank reserved for writers, particularly female, who are said to serve no apprenticeship, to expend no effort in writing, who like Minerva spring full born from Jupiter’s forehead. Not surprisingly, the apparently flattering notion that Sand was not just a bird but a rare one at that, was to mutate in time into other less flattering natural analogies than the ornithological. Most famously, Nietzsche compared the seemingly effortless flow of her prose to that of a milk-cow.

Whether or not Sand was a natural writer, James failed to mark a crucial aspect of what made Indiana so exceptional, and its publication such an event: Sand was in no sense a natural author. When it appeared in May 1832 Indiana bore an unfamiliar and enigmatic signature, G. Sand. Was the author male or female? Did the G stand for George or, as one eminent contemporary critic (Gustave Planche) would have it, Georgina? G. Sand was, as it was soon revealed, the pseudonym of Aurore Dudevant, the recently separated wife of the Baron Casimir Dudevant. Specifically enjoined by her mother-in-law not to sully her noble married name in her pursuit of a professional writing career, Sand gradually elaborated what was to become her lifelong pen-name and accompanying male persona. Writing first in collaboration with her lover Jules Sandeau under a series of pen names (Signol, J. Sand, J.S.), when she published her first solo effort, Indiana, she retained the marginally established and marketable Sand but made it her own by substituting the trace of the lover’s name, the vestigial initial J, by a G. It was only when later that same astonishingly productive year she published her second novel, Valentine, under the name George Sand, that the process of renaming herself was completed.

Given the peculiar difficulties women encountered in assuming authorship of their writings in both France and England, due to obstacles placed in their paths by a misogynistic social and cultural order buttressed by a legal system which worked to dispossess them of their literary productions, George Sand was hardly the only nineteenth-century woman author to adopt a pseudonym—and of course men too adopted pseudonyms, albeit for different reasons. But she was the first of any standing: breaking with a tradition of anonymity and genteel lady novelist ‘Madame de’ signatures, George Sand, née Aurore Dupin, was the initiator of a tradition linking women’s coming to writing with self-naming, a veritable rebirth: ‘In Paris Mme Dudevant is dead. But George Sand is known as a lusty fellow,’ writes Sand to a friend in the flush of Indiana’s success.2 Because of her immense productivity—her œuvre comprises some sixty-nine novels, twenty-five volumes of correspondence, and other forms of writing—and the international status as a cultural icon she achieved in her lifetime, Sand’s use of a male pseudonym was to prove remarkably influential, and nowhere more so than in Victorian England: the English spelling of George—in French the accepted spelling is Georges—finds its ultimate justification in the pseudonym Marian Evans explicitly borrowed from her French model; I am referring of course to George Eliot.

Just the sort of demeaning cultural stereotyping that led so many nineteenth-century women authors to adopt male pseudonyms greeted the publication of what was immediately recognized as a major modern work, the literary event of 1832. Confronted by the sexually unmarked initial of the author’s first name, contemporary male critics trotted out familiar clichés to ascribe a sex to the author and hence a value to his work. These clichés fall into two familiar classes: according to one, women’s and men’s writing is essentially different, bodily grounded in man’s strength and woman’s weakness. Thus Edouard d’Anglemont writes, ‘this is a novel written with all the strength of a man’s grip and all the grace of a woman’s pen’.3 Because Indiana combines allegedly masculine and feminine traits, the critic Jacques Lerond can only conclude that this is a two-handed, doubly authored work: ‘this brilliant but unharmonious cloth is the work of two distinct workers.’4

A second category of clichés involves the relationship between the author and his or her characters: to the extent that an author projects his or her self into a character, he or she gives his or her sex away. Because of Indiana’s extraordinary emphasis on the miseries of female destiny in a patriarchal society, its author could only be a woman; no man could have described woman’s estate as Sand does. By the same token, and more to the point, no man could or would have portrayed the cad Raymon in as clinical a way as Sand does. A similar logic is at work in Baudelaire’s celebrated essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The issue there is not, of course, the sex of the author, which is never in doubt, but the sex of the main female protagonist: for all her femininity, according to Baudelaire, there persists in Emma Bovary a trace of the virility the male author projects on to her, hence her androgyny. An androgynous character can only be the product of an androgynous author. Thus Indiana’s androgynous nature—she is a sort of ultra-feminine Amazon—is viewed not as the result of collaboration between a male and a female author, but rather as the product of her author’s ‘virile character’, her own unstable gender identity.

Now whereas Flaubert proudly and famously proclaimed his identification with his fictional creation—’ Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, he is reported to have said—in her autobiography Sand protests against the widespread implication that her female protagonists are projections of the author: ‘I am too romantic ever to have seen the heroine of a novel in my mirror.’5 Whereas for male authors identification is cause for boasting, for women authors, as feminist critics have convincingly demonstrated, it is cause for concern, because the identification of a male author with his female creation is taken as an emblem of his imaginative powers, while that of a female author is taken as a proof of her creative deficiency. Far better, then, for the author that Sand is in the process of becoming that her text mirror not herself—’ Indiana ce n’est pas moi,’ she might have cried—but external reality. Of course these are not the same processes of reflection: one involves the public and metaphoric mirror that the realist writer following Stendhal is said to carry down the road, the other, the private and literal mirror of the narcissistic woman.

Sand came to writing at the very moment when, under the joint impetus of Stendhal and Balzac, the literary movement that has come to be known as realism was rising to the dominant position it was soon to achieve. Seeking to obtain the literary legitimation that being a realist writer bestows, Sand’s first edition of and first preface to Indiana are replete with protestations of her allegiance to the familiar ideology of realism, namely that it has no ideology: it is pure reproduction, a mirror without a curve, a machine that merely registers material phenomena and events without distorting them. ‘The writer is only a mirror which reflects them [society’s inequalities and fate’s whims], a machine which traces their outline, and he has nothing for which to apologize if the impressions are correct and the reflection is faithful.’6

What the 1832 versions of the preface and text demonstrate is that for a fledgeling writer realism provided the means for distancing oneself from the sort of unreal or idealistic romantic literature often disparagingly associated with femininity, especially in the heyday of the novel’s rise in the eighteenth century. The gendering of the aesthetic categories of realism and idealism is clearly enunciated by Balzac, when in a conversation Sand transcribes in her autobiography, Story of My Life, he tells her:

You are looking for man as he should be; I take him as he is.