Nancy E. Rogers

Scouring indices for references to George Sand Nanon is scarcely a rewarding
task. Patricia Thompson (in George Sand and the Victorians) tells us that Henry
James mistakenly placed Nanon among Sand's earlier works, ¹ hardly a tribute to
its worth, and André Maurois dismissed most of the later works, saying there
"tended to be a sameness about the themes." ² Emile Zola is one of the few French
writers even to have considered Nanon, which he described as a "prose poem";
characteristically, he saw the mythic proportions of the work, depicting "the eternal
couple" moving into the future. ³ However, Nanon is a far more significant work
than Zola envisioned. Published in 1872, it yields surprising gifts to the student of
the French Revolution as well as to critics interested in Sand's conception of
woman, her place in society, and her potential for transcending society's strictures.
Nanon, like many of Sand's novels, is an important document for historians,
sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, and literary critics alike.

The tale of Nanette Surgeon, or Nanon as she is known--the non of her name
perhaps reflecting her own stance vis-à-vis the status society has decreed for
her--is one of revolution. Like Mauprat, the Sandian novel that it most closely
resembles and that touched on the American Revolution, Nanon is a story of
adventure and love, uniting an unlikely couple in an enduring marriage. However,
the key to Nanon is not the evolution and education of a straying male, as it is in
Mauprat, but the liberation of the two halves of the couple, resulting in the first
entrepreneurial matriarchy in French literature.

Like Honoré de Balzac Les Chouans ( 1829) and the major portion of Victor Hugo's
Quatre-vingi-treize ( 1872), Sand's novel chronicling the French Revolu-
tion takes place outside Paris. Whereas Balzac and Hugo set their tales in the midst
of the guerilla warfare of the Vendée, Sand only touches on that strange, almost
mythical, conflict of fierce peasants and gigantic characters to focus on the effects

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