Recommendations
Books Like Indiana
Best books to read after Indiana by George Sand
Readers moved by George Sand's proto-feminist novel of a woman's struggle against an unjust marriage will find companion works in her later fiction, in the Victorian feminist novels that developed her themes, and in the French Romantic tradition she shaped.
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Lélia
by George Sand
Sand's second major novel and more philosophically radical than Indiana — where Indiana argues for women's right to leave bad marriages, Lélia goes further: her heroine has lost the capacity for love itself and meditates on the impossibility of finding the absolute in the human; the most intellectually ambitious of Sand's early novels.
- 2Buy
Corinne, or Italy
by Germaine de Staël
The predecessor that most directly shaped Indiana — de Staël's novel about the female genius destroyed by social convention is the immediate French Romantic predecessor to Sand's feminist argument; both novels are about women whose gifts exceed what their social world can accommodate.
- 3Buy
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The French realist novel that develops Indiana's subject in the most important way — Flaubert admired Sand and Emma Bovary's entrapment in a provincial marriage she despises is the later, more clinical version of Indiana's situation; the most significant development of Sand's theme in French fiction.
- 4Buy
A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
The Norwegian play that made Sand's feminist argument about marriage on the European stage — Nora's final exit from her comfortable prison is the theatrical equivalent of Indiana's claim that women's lives are governed by unjust laws; reading both shows the same argument made across forty years and two national literatures.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The American novel that is Indiana's most important transatlantic descendant — Edna Pontellier's awakening to the inadequacy of her social role and her refusal to accept the boundaries placed on women's lives is the American development of Sand's feminist argument; the most powerful feminist novel in the American tradition.
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Consuelo
by George Sand
Sand's most celebrated later novel — a massive roman-à-clef about a female opera singer drawing on Sand's relationship with Chopin; if Indiana satisfies, Consuelo shows Sand's range at full maturity and the full development of her feminist vision beyond the apprentice work of 1832.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The Victorian novel that develops Sand's feminist argument in the fullest English-language form — Dorothea Brooke's desire to live a larger life than her society allows her directly parallels Indiana's; Eliot was a devoted reader of Sand and the parallel is conscious and deep.
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The Story of My Life
by George Sand
Sand's massive autobiography — the essential companion to Indiana for understanding the life that produced the novel; Sand's account of her marriage to Casimir Dudevant and her decision to leave him for Paris gives the autobiographical context for Indiana's feminist argument.
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