Mauprat Reading Order

Mauprat (1837) by George Sand is the novel in which she first synthesized her early feminist social critique with the historical novel form, producing what many critics consider the most formally satisfying of her major novels — a Gothic romance about the education of a man, the transformation of male brutality into authentic feeling through the influence of a woman who refuses to accept the limitation of female powerlessness. Bernard de Mauprat, raised among a band of brutal feudal brigands in a ruined castle in the Berry, falls in love with his cousin Edmée and pursues her with the possessive violence of his upbringing; the novel is the story of how Edmée's intelligence and principled resistance gradually educate Bernard into something like an equal. Sand wrote Mauprat during her most politically engaged period (she was close to the Saint-Simonists and to the republican politics that would culminate in her participation in the events of 1848) and the novel is explicitly a study in how feudal brutality is transformed into republican virtue through education — a feminist argument about male formation that anticipates the twentieth-century debate about gender and socialization. George Eliot translated Mauprat (a translation she later disowned) and the novel's influence on Daniel Deronda and Felix Holt the Radical is visible.