Consuelo Reading Order

Consuelo (1842–43) by George Sand is the most ambitious and encyclopedic of her novels — a vast Bildungsroman about a Spanish-Bohemian singer who rises from poverty in eighteenth-century Venice to become the greatest soprano in Europe, moving through the Austrian court, the Bohemian countryside, and the musical world of Haydn and Porpora. Sand wrote Consuelo as a serial novel for the Revue indépendante and continued it in a sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1843–44), which moves Consuelo into the world of Masonic secret societies, eighteenth-century utopian politics, and Sand's evolving mystical socialism. The novel is remarkable for several things: its detailed portrait of the eighteenth-century musical world (Sand had intimate knowledge of this world through her relationship with Chopin); its sustained portrait of a working female artist whose artistic integrity is not in conflict with her emotional life; and its synthesis of the Romantic novel of individual development with a utopian social vision that prefigures Sand's engagement with the politics of 1848. Consuelo is the Sand novel most admired by Dostoevsky (who translated it into Russian), by Turgenev, and by George Eliot.