Her best-selling novels were an indictment of marriage and the female condition in the patriarchal 19th century. Her later works pioneered ecology and portrayed the rural poor with uncommon dignity. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Her name had crossed the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean before she turned 30. Today, we don't read her. There's no better proof than I tried to build you a reading list and could only find a handful of her novels, out of 70+, in current English editions. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her famous lovers, her cross-dressing ways and her promiscuity, a scandalous reputation largely overblown by pop culture and which obscures a massive and ahead-of-her-time body of literary work.

For the second episode of the Broad History podcast, I talked to British academic and poet Fiona Sampson, author of a new biography of George Sand out now in the UK and in June in the US, about the thoroughly modern woman she uncovered. Sand was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person, regardless of the expectations set on her sex.

In this episode:

• Why even successful women writers keep dropping out of the literary canon
• What it meant to be a girl in the Bridgerton years
• Why George Sand is even called George Sand – and the realities of writing as a woman
• The real reason she wore trousers
• The relationships (yes, there were a few) — and why she's still a queer icon
• Cameos by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frederik Chopin, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen

Watch the full interview

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