First published in 1916 as part of the Cambridge Modern French series, this book contains the French text of George Sand's 1872 short story 'Les Ailes de Courage', which Sand originally wrote for her grandchildren. A series of exercises and a vocabulary are included at the back. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in George Sand or the history of French education in Britain.

Indiana, a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage, is seduced by a charming neighbor who is not as polished and pure as he appears. She embarks on a journey to find real love, leading to an unexpected discovery about the object of her affection. Indiana is a young woman from French Louisiana who's married to the much older Colonel Delmare. Their union is strict and often oppressive, leaving her unfulfilled. Indiana shares their home with her cousin Ralph and her loyal maid, Noun. One evening they encounter a handsome young man, Raymon de Ramiere, who becomes interested in Indiana. Yet, prior to their meeting, Raymon had already seduced Noun who is pregnant with his child. This complicated dynamic forces Indiana to decide what she really wants: passion or stability? Indiana is a bold commentary on the institution of marriage in France. It examines the implied gender roles and responsibilities pushed upon women. Sand champions the need for passion and true love, regardless of social convention. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Indiana is both modern and readable.

Two years after his wife's death, Germain is encouraged to move on and find a new woman and home to accommodate his three growing children. He travels to visit a single woman who is eager to start a new family. Following his daughter's death, Pere Maurice has provided constant support for his son-in-law Germain. But after two years, he pushes him to find a new wife. Germain is a young man with three children in need of a mother. Maurice sends him to visit the daughter of a friend, who is also widowed and interested in remarrying. Germain reluctantly agrees, taking his son and the teenager Mary, who is seeking employment. The trip proves to be an eye-opening experience for the duo who form an unexpected bond. Similar to Sand's previous work, Indiana, The Devil's Pool examines the obligations of marriage. The story illustrates how duty and perception take priority over love and kindness. It's a dichotomy that continues to present itself, regardless of one's social or political status. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Devil's Pool is both modern and readable.

"An admirable ruse, indeed To inspire in me the horror of females, only to throw it in my face and say: but this is what you are."

The handsome, heroic heir to a vast estate, raised as a man to follow a man's pursuits and to despise women, is devastated to learn at the age of seventeen that he is in fact a she. Gabriel courageously refuses to give up her male privileges, and her tragic struggle to work and fight and love in all the ways she knows how offers a window into the obstacles faced by George Sand, the prolific intellectual woman whom the popular press portrayed as a promiscuous, cigar-smoking oddity in trousers. "Strange that the most virile talent of our time should be a woman's " exclaimed a reviewer in 1838.

Kathleen Robin Hart's introduction contextualizes the drama, discussing its relation to the theater of Sand's day, the sentimental tradition, the subversive workings of carnival and masquerade, and the vein of literary androgyny in Romantic works.

Kathleen Robin Hart's introduction contextualizes the drama, discussing its relation to the theater of Sand's day, the sentimental tradition, the subversive workings of carnival and masquerade, and the vein of literary androgyny in Romantic works.

Regarded as one of Sand's best novels, Lelia is an important document in the evolution of women's consciousness. Published in 1833, when Sand was 29, it stunned Victorians by advocating the same standard of morality for men and women and by suggesting that both the prostitute and the married woman were slaves to male desire. Sand also questioned monogamy, fidelity, and monastic celibacy. She later made an unsuccessful attempt to revise the book and to expunge its despair and skepticism.

Although Sand wrote copiously, until recently only a handful of her books were available in English. This first English translation of Lelia is an excellent rendering, capturing the raptures, the mysticism, and the nineteenth-century flavor ot its eternally fascinating subject."

Urbain, the Marquis de Villemer is the younger brother of Duke d'Aleria, and is eager to clear his family's debt to ensure his mother's happiness. The siblings have drastically different views on the purpose of money and marriage. A marchioness is eager to marry off her two sons: Duke d'Aleria and Urbain, the Marquis de Villemer. The former is the eldest, a charming playboy whose gambling addiction has saddled the family with debt. Urbain is the younger, more responsible son, who's willing to sacrifice his happiness for his mother's security. The men interact with several women, including Caroline, a secretary and companion to their mother. She is pulled into a strange world that hinges on marriage arrangements and social capital. The Marquis de Villemer is a nineteenth century novel that embodies popular elements of that time. It's fueled by class disparity, mismatched romance and financial strain. It also highlights family legacy and the desire to keep up appearances. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Marquis de Villmer is both modern and readable.

Urbain, the Marquis de Villemer is the younger brother of Duke d’Aleria, and is eager to clear his family’s debt to ensure his mother’s happiness. The siblings have drastically different views on the purpose of money and marriage. A marchioness is eager to marry off her two sons: Duke d’Aleria and Urbain, the Marquis de Villemer. The former is the eldest, a charming playboy whose gambling addiction has saddled the family with debt. Urbain is the younger, more responsible son, who’s willing to sacrifice his happiness for his mother’s security. The men interact with several women, including Caroline, a secretary and companion to their mother. She is pulled into a strange world that hinges on marriage arrangements and social capital. The Marquis de Villemer is a nineteenth century novel that embodies popular elements of that time. It’s fueled by class disparity, mismatched romance and financial strain. It also highlights family legacy and the desire to keep up appearances. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Marquis de Villmer is both modern and readable.

"Valentine would come out of her oratory intensely excited, with her nerves on edge and the blood flowing hotly through her veins. At such times Benedict's glances and words laid waste her heart like a stream of molten lava. If he had been hypocritical or adroit enough to present adultery to her in a mystic light, Valentine would have been ruined with a prayer on her lips..." Deep in George Sand's own natal countryside of Berri in central France, Valentine de Raimbault, daughter of the chateau, and Benedict Lhery, cousin and adopted son of one of its tenant farmers, meet and fall headlong in love. Though they are very young, she 18 and he 22, both are already engaged to be married: he to his cousin, a beautiful and imperious girl who sees him as a stepping stone to comfort and security, and she to a dissolute diplomat who needs her wealth to pay his gigantic gambling debts. They must both first realize the extraordinary power of their feelings, and then enter a terrible battle with relatives, expectations and conventions, where their difference in rank proves a massive obstacle. Their union will indeed be hard won, if it can be. As they fight to understand and fulfil their love, the world bends, breaks and remakes itself around them many times. In the uncertainty, one of them unwillingly marries; the other rejects passionately the idea of a life united to any but their loved one. Lives are lost, arguments are precipitated into great conflicts, scores are settled and new ones created, intrigues are pursued, misunderstandings are promoted, long-held secrets are finally revealed. It is only when a chance mistake proves disastrously final that their tragic love finds its whole meaning, that the pattern they are creating in their lives fulfils its extraordinary design. This intensely passionate novel, the author's second, was first published in 1832. George Sand (Amandine Dupin, afterwards Baroness Dudevant) was born in Paris in 1804. She was raised largely by her grandmother at the family estate of Nohant in Berri, a region of central France. After rebelling an unsuccessful marriage, she had affairs with authors Prosper Merimee and Alfred de Musset, composer Frederic Chopin, and the actress Marie Dorval, among others. Her output of acclaimed novels, plays, travel sketches and autobiography was prodigious, beginning in the late 1820s and continuing until her death in 1876.

The Country Waif (Francoise le Champi) is the second of the three pastoral novels which rank along with George Sand's autobiographical writing as her finest work. Although simple in themselves, these tales have behind them much of the complex experience of her extraordinary life. As Mrs. Zimmerman writes in the introduction, they reflect Sand's youthful romanticism, her later championing of the working classes, and her desire to record in fiction that was both poetic and factual the lives of the people and the region she knew best. Set in the countryside of the author's native province of Berry, The Country Waif tells the story of Francois, an orphan boy placed in a rural foster home, and Madeline, the miller's wife who befriends him. Sand's contemporary, Turgenev, wrote that it was in her best manner, simple, true, affecting. The book has been admired by writers as diverse as Willa Cather (she found it supremely beautiful) and Andre Malraux, who considered it a masterpiece.As well as examining the setting, language, and narrative mode of the novel, the introduction looks at Sand's life, in part from the feminist perspective, with attention to the sociopolitical background of the post-Napoleonic era, when Aurore Dudevant felt impelled to rebel against her status as a country wife and to become George Sand. Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The first translation of The Countess von Rudolstadt in more than a century brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt, born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression. Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval-and aims to channel their potential for future change. Fed by Sand's rich imagination and bold aspirations for social reform, The Countess von Rudolstadt is a sinuous novel of initiation, continuing the coming of age tale of the titular heroine of Sand's earlier Consuelo and drawing on such diverse models as Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.