Histoire de ma vie Reading Order

Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life, 1854-55) by George Sand is the most important French female autobiography of the nineteenth century — a vast memoir in twenty volumes, covering Sand's childhood in Berry and Paris, her aristocratic grandmother and her actress mother, her convent education, her unhappy marriage to Casimir Dudevant, her escape to Paris and her literary career, her relationships with Jules Sandeau, Musset, and Chopin, and her political commitments in the Revolution of 1848. Histoire de ma vie is remarkable in the tradition of French autobiography for several things: its frank engagement with Sand's mother (a beautiful, emotional, lower-class woman whom the aristocratic grandmother tried to exclude from Sand's life), which becomes a meditation on class and femininity; its treatment of Sand's years at the Couvent des Anglaises in Paris, where she spent a period of religious mysticism that she later analyzed with the same precision that Rousseau brought to his own conversion experience; and its refusal of the self-justifying frame that characterizes Rousseau's Confessions — Sand is more interested in understanding the social forces that shaped her than in defending her choices. The autobiography is one of the fullest pictures of the literary, artistic, and political world of Paris in the 1830s and 1840s available in any language.