Recommendations
Books Like Elle et Lui
Best books to read after Elle et Lui by George Sand
Readers drawn to Elle et Lui's roman à clef portrait of the Sand-Musset affair, its analysis of the creative woman's relationship with a male genius, and its place in literary history will find Musset's companion version and the tradition of the literary love affair novel.
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The Confession of a Child of the Century
by Alfred de Musset
The companion roman à clef — Musset's 1836 novel is his fictionalized version of the same affair that Sand tells in Elle et Lui, with the Musset figure (Octave de T.) as the suffering protagonist and the Sand figure (Brigitte Pierson) as the faithless lover; reading both together gives both sides of the most documented literary love affair in French Romanticism, in both partners' own words.
- 2Buy
Indiana
by George Sand
Sand's first novel and the founding text of her feminist fiction — Indiana (1832) was published before the affair with Musset began, and reading it alongside Elle et Lui shows the continuity between Sand's artistic vision and her emotional life; Indiana's analysis of female constraint in marriage is the framework within which the Sand-Musset affair can be understood.
- 3Buy
Lélia
by George Sand
The companion Sand novel written during the early stages of the affair — Lélia (1833) was published in the same year that Sand and Musset met, and its portrait of a woman who has lost the capacity for happiness anticipates the emotional terrain that Elle et Lui would document; Lélia is partly the pre-history of the affair, Elle et Lui its aftermath.
- 4Buy
Lorenzaccio
by Alfred de Musset
Musset's masterpiece and the companion text in his own work — written during or immediately after the Venice period of the affair, Lorenzaccio's analysis of the corruption of idealism by the means of its achievement is readable as Musset's philosophical account of what the Sand relationship revealed about his own nature; the political drama is also an emotional self-portrait.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
The modern companion in the tradition of the autobiographical novel of the literary love affair — Hemingway's 1929 novel about his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky is the twentieth-century equivalent of Sand and Musset's competing roman à clef versions; both raise the same question about what it means to transform a real relationship into fiction while one of the participants is still alive.
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The Lover
by Marguerite Duras
The modern French companion in the tradition of the autobiographical erotic narrative — Duras's 1984 novel about her affair as a teenage girl in Indochina with a Chinese man is the twentieth-century inheritor of Sand's autobiographical fiction; both writers used their own lives as material while maintaining the formal claim that the result is a novel, not a memoir, and both raised questions about the ethical stakes of that transformation.
- 7Buy
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
by Deirdre Bair
The modern biographical companion that illuminates Elle et Lui's tradition — Bair's biography of Beauvoir, who had a famous open relationship with Sartre that raised many of the same questions as the Sand-Musset affair (the woman of genius in relationship with a man of genius, the question of who controls whose artistic development, the problem of competing autobiographical claims), provides the twentieth-century context for understanding Elle et Lui's historical significance.
- 8Buy
Him with His Foot in His Mouth
by Saul Bellow
The American companion in the tradition of the literary figure's self-justifying autobiographical account — Bellow's stories in this collection, particularly the title story, are the late twentieth-century male equivalent of Musset's Confession: brilliant, self-aware, and fundamentally unable to see the woman in the story as anything other than a figure in the narrator's account of himself; reading Musset and Bellow together, and then Sand and Bellow's female contemporaries, defines the problem Elle et Lui was trying to address.
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