Reading Order
Indiana Reading Order
Indiana (1832) by George Sand (Aurore Dupin) is the novel that launched the most prolific career in 19th-century French literature — written in three weeks by a 27-year-old woman who had separated from her husband and was beginning her first autonomous life, it is both a feminist manifesto and a passionate novel about the incompatibility of marriage, love, and female freedom. Indiana Delmare is a Creole woman from the Île Bourbon (Réunion) married to a much older soldier-husband in the Berri countryside; she falls in love with Raymon de Ramière, a handsome opportunist; is protected by her cousin Ralph; and eventually finds freedom in an improbable exile on the Île Bourbon. Sand's argument is explicit: the laws of marriage are unjust, they were made by men for men, and a woman who has been treated as property by the law has not broken any contract when she follows her own heart. The novel was an immediate scandal and an immediate success, making Sand the most famous living French author within months of her literary debut. Sand went on to write over 70 novels and plays over the next 45 years; Indiana established the themes (female independence, nature versus society, the possibility of a freer life elsewhere) that would define the best of her work.
Where to start
Indiana
Complete Indiana Book List
- 1Buy
Indiana
George Sand·1832·The first novel; Sand published it under the pseudonym 'G. Sand' without specifying sex, and the initial debates about whether the author was male or female are part of the novel's reception history - 2Buy
Lélia
George Sand·1833·The immediate sequel in thematic terms: Sand's philosophical novel of a woman incapable of feeling, who has transcended desire and found it empty; the most radical and least read of the early Sand novels, and the most philosophically ambitious - 3Buy
La Mare au diable
George Sand·1846·The pastoral counterpoint: the Berry countryside novels (also including François le champi and La Petite Fadette) are the opposite of Indiana's social protest; Sand finds in the peasant community the natural freedom that Indiana's exile cannot provide - 4Buy
Consuelo
George Sand·1843·Sand's most ambitious novel: the Bohemian singer Consuelo who maintains her artistic integrity through multiple social and romantic pressures; the Staël Corinne figure transposed into the world of 18th-century Central European music - 5Buy
Corinne ou l'Italie
Germaine de Staël·1807·The predecessor Sand is explicitly answering: Indiana is Sand's critique of Staël's Corinne — where Corinne is destroyed by the man who cannot choose her, Sand wants a different conclusion, though her first attempt at it ends in ambiguity
Indiana — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Indiana autobiographical?
Substantially. Sand had separated from her husband Casimir Dudevant in 1831 and Indiana is partly her account of the incompatibility of marriage and female freedom. Ralph, the protective cousin, has elements of several men in Sand's life. But the novel is also a conscious argument, not just autobiography: Sand is making a case about the injustice of marriage law, not just narrating her own experience.
Why is the ending of Indiana strange?
The ending — Ralph and Indiana suicide pact that is somehow not a suicide, followed by their establishment of a small community on the Île Bourbon — is the weakest part of the novel and Sand knew it. She is trying to provide both tragic conclusion and utopian alternative and achieves neither convincingly. It shows the difficulty of imagining female freedom in 1832 France: Sand cannot find a realistic happy ending, so she invents a fantastic one.
Who was George Sand?
Aurore Dupin (1804–1876), who published under the pseudonym George Sand, was the most famous French author of the 19th century during her lifetime, more famous than Balzac, Flaubert, or Hugo by contemporary measures. She was the lover of Chopin, de Musset, and others, a republican socialist who campaigned actively in 1848, a prolific essayist and playwright, and an author whose 70+ novels range from feminist social protest to pastoral idyll to historical romance.
What is the Île Bourbon in Indiana?
The Île Bourbon (now Réunion) is the French Indian Ocean island where Indiana was born. Her colonial origin is part of her outsider status in France: she is an exotic creature in the Berri countryside, and her eventual return to the island represents both the impossibility of female freedom within French society and the possibility of it outside its boundaries.
Is Indiana feminist by modern standards?
Partially. Sand argues powerfully against the property status of women in marriage and against the double standard of sexual morality. But Indiana's freedom is dependent on Ralph (a man) and her own refuge is ultimately a withdrawal from society rather than a transformation of it. Sand is at the beginning of feminist argument, not at a point where full social equality is yet imagined.
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