Naked in the Marketplace The Lives of George Sand

Benita Eisler sheds new light on one of the nineteenth century's most infamous and inspirational women. As the first woman in Europe to become a best-selling novelist, George Sand was the author of nearly ninety works of fiction, twenty thousand letters, and thousands of pages of autobiographical texts and political commentary. Her fame, however, was inseparable from her notoriety. The scandal of leaving her husband and children to live in Paris with an eighteen-year-old lover was followed by many liaisons and friendships with talented men, such as Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Balzac, and Flaubert. Sand's genius and passions were intertwined. Eisler masterfully highlights the many roles, triumphs, and losses that together forged Sand's overwhelming-and enduring-presence. Book jacket.

A native New Yorker, Benita Eisler was educated at Smith and Harvard. She has worked as an art editor, reporter, on-camera correspondent, and producer of arts programming for pubic television. Her interest in the varieties of artistic expression is reflected in her teaching and writing: She has taught the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury novel at Princeton and is the author of biographies of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; Lord Byron, and Frédéric Chopin. She lives in Manhattan.