SOURCE: "George Sand: Social Protest in Her Early Works," in George Sand Papers: Conference Proceedings, 1976, AMS Press, Inc., 1976, pp. 66-75.

In the following essay, Rogers traces Sand's sociopolitical awareness in her early novels. Though these novels are more pessimistic than Sand's later works, she argues, they display a similar commitment to equality and freedom.

Many of George Sand's critics have insisted upon her lack of originality, her inability to formulate ideas of her own, or her capacity to adopt easily the notions of others, especially those of her lovers. André Maurois, the most sensitive and thorough of her twentieth-century biographers, sees this question somewhat differently: "True, she took over the ideas of Michel de Bourges, of Lamennais, of Pierre Leroux, 'but they were ideas with which she was already familiar.' "' Long before 1842 when Sand first specifically stated her political and social positions, collected under the title...