Recommendations
Books Like La Petite Fadette
Best books to read after La Petite Fadette by George Sand
George Sand's La Petite Fadette (1849) is the last and richest of her Berry pastoral trilogy — the story of the outcast girl Fadette, despised as a witch's granddaughter, who is loved by one of a pair of twins. The fullest of the Berry pastorals in its engagement with rural folklore and female knowledge, and the one that most directly addresses Sand's feminist concern with the social exclusion of women who exceed the limits of their prescribed role.
- 1Buy
La Mare au diable
by George Sand
The first and most concentrated of the Berry pastorals — the essential companion for La Petite Fadette and the best introduction to the trilogy for new readers.
- 2Buy
François le Champi
by George Sand
The companion Berry pastoral — the foundling boy who loves the miller's wife is the companion figure to Fadette, both of them social outsiders who find acceptance through the love of a good person.
- 3Buy
Indiana
by George Sand
The founding Sand novel — the essential context for La Petite Fadette's feminist concern with the woman who exceeds the prescribed limits of her social role, shown here in a bourgeois setting before the Berry pastorals transfer it to the rural world.
- 4Buy
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Brontë's Heathcliff is the most important contemporary parallel to Fadette — the outsider despised by the community who carries the seeds of a finer nature, and whose rejection by the social world that should recognize him/her is the most important theme shared between the two novels.
- 5Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's pastoral novel is the most important English-language parallel to the Berry pastorals — the same sympathetic precision about farm life and labor, the same interest in rural women's independence and its social costs, and the same refusal to sentimentalize the rural world.
- 6Buy
Colette
by Colette
Colette's La Maison de Claudine and Sido are the twentieth-century successors in the French tradition of the literary engagement with rural female knowledge and the world of the mother — the Burgundy of Colette's childhood is to Sido what the Berry of Sand's childhood is to the pastorals.
- 7Buy
Histoire de ma vie
by George Sand
Sand's autobiography — the essential companion for understanding the biographical background to the Berry pastorals, including Sand's own childhood at Nohant and her relationship with the peasants of the Berry region whose world the pastorals document.
- 8Buy
Lélia
by George Sand
The most extreme Sand novel of female exclusion and spiritual exhaustion — the contrast with La Petite Fadette shows the full range of Sand's feminist engagement, from Fadette's earthy social reintegration to Lélia's absolute refusal of all available social forms.
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