Aux frontières du génie chez George Sand

Today at the museum in La Châtre - partly dedicated to the author George Sand - we visited a lecture with the above title: 'At the borders of genius of George Sand' or in French:

"Une heure, une œuvre au Musée de La Châtre : "Aux frontières du Génie chez George Sand". Conférence sur une œuvre du musée George Sand et de la Vallée Noire, animée par le Docteur Baum et Franck Lloyd"

Psychiatrist, doctor Baum and teacher and director Frank Lloyd, talked about the bipolarity (bipolar disorder) George Sand had to struggle with.
I write "struggle" but her bipolarity was, according to these two gentlemen, in part also an explanation to her enormous creativity and explains how she managed to achieve so many things in her life. This mostly during her manic periods of course.

Besides writing almost 70 novels, she wrote novellettes, stage plays, fairy tales, literary critic, autobiographies and some 20 000 letters, that is to say 3-4 letters per day at an average.
The person to whom she wrote most frequently was Alfred de Musset.

She also helped other writers and musicians as being their foremost patron, friend and maecenas. Many of them should, perhaps, not even have survived without her help.
Among the men around her we found Frédéric Chopin, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac and many others.
Of course she also had female friends, of whom we, unfortunately, know less.
She is said to have had at least 19 lovers, of both sexes.

Among both past time generations and contemporaries she was and is considered being a feminist although she didn't characterise herself as such.
Besides her extensive writing, socializing and her engagement in the welfare of other writers and musicians, she also engaged herself in politics, although not within a specific political organisation.

In the audience (the museum totally filled up with people) there were a great number of people knowing the works and life of George Sand very well and a quite vivid discussion came about.

As being a Swede, I would like to say that George Sand deserves becoming more well known as a writer in Sweden. Most Swedes know her as the muse of Frédéric Chopin and as a rather marginal writer. This picture need to be revised.

George Sand. Confidences de la Dame de Nohant
envoyé par efiestas. - Découvrez plus de vidéos créatives.

(Picture of George Sand copied from: http://thebsreport.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/georgesand.jpg)