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My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress... So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.

By the age of thirty, the novelist who had been born Aurore Dupin in 1804 had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English, her daring literary experiments were out-selling even Victor Hugo. But the legend of Sand herself scandalised Paris. Not only prodigiously talented but cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women.

What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy? Or did her emotional and creative relationships with many of the leading figures of her day – from Fryderyk Chopin to Gustave Flaubert, and Alfred de Musset to Eugène Delacroix – form part of her dialogue with the world around her: a dialogue that is intrinsic to writing itself?

In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. Too often underestimated in the century and a half since her death, she speaks to us today – about ecology, politics, society, gender – with brilliant prescience; a figure ahead of her time.

Praise for Fiona Sampson:

‘Fiona Sampson is a sleuth of a biographer ... rarely has my jaw dropped on so many occasions while reading a biography.’ Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail on In Search of Mary Shelley

‘Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling.’ Charlotte Gordon, Washington Post on Two Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘If we get another literary biography [this year] as astute and feelingful as this one, we shall be lucky.’ John Carey, The Sunday Times on In Search of Mary Shelley

© Fiona Sampson 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026