Reading Order
Valentine Reading Order
Valentine (1832) by George Sand is the second novel she published and the one that established the characteristic themes of her early fiction — the analysis of how class barriers destroy love, the portrait of the aristocratic woman trapped in a loveless marriage, and the democratic argument that the peasant's love is as noble as the nobleman's. Valentine de Raimbault, a young aristocrat, falls in love with Bénédict, a young farmer of exceptional qualities but no social position; the love affair is destroyed by the social machinery of marriage, inheritance, and class honor that the Restoration has put in place of the emotional authenticity that the Revolution promised. Valentine is less psychologically dense than Indiana (1832, published the same year) and less philosophically ambitious than Lélia (1833), but it is in some ways the most socially specific of Sand's early novels — the analysis of how the Berry rural aristocracy reproduces itself through strategic marriage is as precise as anything in Balzac, and the portrait of the peasant community surrounding Valentine's château is a first sketch of the pastoral world Sand would develop fully in La Mare au Diable fifteen years later.
Where to start
Valentine (1832) — the novel is moderate length (about 300 pages) and more accessible than Indiana or Lélia. The Nabu Press reprint of the old Calvert translation exists in English, though out of print; a French edition is available in the Classiques Garnier series. Read after Indiana and before Lélia — Valentine is the middle term in Sand's early novelistic trilogy, more socially specific than Indiana and less philosophically extreme than Lélia.
Complete Valentine Book List
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Valentine
George Sand·1832·Sand's second novel, published the same year as Indiana (1832). The Berry setting and the sympathetic portrait of the peasant community anticipate the pastoral novels of the 1840s.
Valentine — Frequently Asked Questions
How does Valentine relate to Indiana?
Indiana (1832) and Valentine (1832) were both published in the same year — Indiana in May, Valentine in November — and are usually read as companion novels that together define Sand's early fictional world. The connection is geographical: both are set partly in the Berry region of central France that Sand knew from childhood, and both use the Berry social world (the relationship between aristocratic estates, tenant farmers, and the rural poor) as the ground for their analysis of how Restoration social institutions destroy authentic feeling. The thematic connection is also precise: both novels center on an aristocratic woman in a bad marriage who falls in love with a man her social position forbids; both analyze the legal and social machinery that traps women in the Restoration system of property and marriage. But the two novels make different formal choices. Indiana is more psychologically concentrated on its heroine and more formally controlled; Valentine spreads its attention more widely across the social community of the Berry château, and its male protagonist Bénédict is more fully developed as an independent character than Indiana's Ralph. Valentine also ends more ambiguously — both protagonists die — where Indiana's ending (the utopian retreat to the Bourbon Island plantation) allows a qualified resolution. The pairing of Indiana and Valentine shows Sand working out two versions of the same fundamental analysis.
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