Leone Leoni

George Sand's Leone Leoni reverses the Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut and gives Manon's helplessly amoral character to a man, Leoni. The girl he seduces becomes the exponent of undying, endless, forgiving love. The setting is the demimonde of Venice, and the plot is thick with sinister figures whose influence drag the miserable lovers down. The hapless Juliet has a champion, however, who is willing to go to any lengths to save her from her passion; his desperate act provides the final ironic flourish to a spellbinding tale. Leone Leoni is only one of nine novels and non-fiction works by George Sand published in trade paperback by Academy Chicago.

George Sand is the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, a 19th century French novelist and memoirist. Sand is best known for her novels Indiana, Lélia, and Consuelo, and for her memoir A Winter in Majorca, in which she reflects on her time on the island with Chopin in 1838-39. A champion of the poor and working classes, Sand was an early socialist who published her own newspaper using a workers' co-operative and scorned gender conventions by wearing men's clothing and smoking tobacco in public. George Sand died in France in 1876.