George Sand

George Sand was the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Dupin de Francueil, a French novelist, memoirist and journalist who lived from 1804 to 1876. She is regarded as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era, and in the 1830s and 1840s her reputation in Britain stood higher than that of either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac. Her output was very large: about seventy novels together with more than fifty volumes of tales, plays and political writing. Sand used a masculine pseudonym, wore men's clothing in public and led a turbulent love life, all of which made her scandalous to conservative society. She argued for women's rights and for passion, criticized marriage as an institution and challenged the prejudices of her day, following the example of her step great-grandmother Louise Dupin, whom she admired.