Nathalie Sarraute, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Yourcenar should have
proved so utterly disdainful of their predecessor and, worse, so unconcerned with
depicting convincing female characters in their own fiction.

Things changed with the second half of this century. The rehabilitation of George
Sand, not necessarily as a practitioner of the art of fiction as Flaubert, Henry James,
and Thomas Mann have redefined it, but as an autobiographer and an incomparable
letter writer, is due to a few French and other European biographers: André
Maurois, Renee Winegarten, Joseph Barry and, above all, to the indefatigable and
bold Georges Lubin, to whom all scholars of nineteenth-century French literature
are heavily indebted. It is due also to a number of scholars, writers, critics--cou-
rageous and enterprising minds--who have been gathering around Hofstra Univer-
sity. Unmindful of trends and fashions that, elsewhere in the New World, preached
other cults and favored philosophical, sociological, linguistic, or hermeneutic ap-
proaches to literary works, the Cultural Center of Hofstra University has preferred
simplicity and a modest spirit of inquiry. Without any fanfare, it has drawn
researchers from several continents. It has brought them to a center deeply com-
mitted to the whole of the nineteenth century rather than only Sandian studies, a
center that has become the focus of an admiration not exempt of a little envy by
other and more traditional universities. Its publications are read and appreciated by
scholars everywhere. A huge debt of gratitude is owed by all researchers and lovers
of literature to the president of Hofstra University, James M. Shuart, who im-
mediately sensed and encouraged the importance of the Hofstra Cultural Center
when it was created by the late Professor Joseph G. Astman. Natalie Datlof and
Alexej Ugrinsky have devoted immense efforts, much imaginative and ingenious
zeal to the gathering of more than fifty international conferences--three of which
have been devoted to George Sand and her times. Through them, and the devotion
and enthusiasm of scores of scholars from American and European universities,
George Sand has regained her rightful place among the early advocates of the rights
of women. A group of Sandian scholars is active in Holland at the University of
Amsterdam. A renewal of interest in Sandian fiction has surged up in the land of
one of her faithful readers, Dostoevski, where the poetic achievement by women
in this century surpasses in depth and emotional power all other feminine poetry.
Between 1850 and 1950, the French had been liberally given credit in the United
States for having discovered, naturalized among them, and imposed on other
cultures Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner. Americans in
return have rehabilitated and reinterpreted both Denis Diderot, long neglected by
his compatriots, and then today, thanks to Hofstra, George Sand. She is now truly
our contemporary.

The feminist movement has played its rightful role in this process of rejuvena-
tion. George Sand, however, cannot be treated primarily as a feminist propagandist.
A courageous article by Annabelle Rea entitled "George Sand Misogynist?"
appeared in the 1983 volume of the Hofstra George Sand Newsletter. Avowals in
Sand Histoire de ma vie bluntly confess that she was unable to put up very long
with the company of women, who, she felt, exhibited narcissism and nervous
tenseness. Without any allusion to sexual attraction, on which she was usually very

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