After a number of unsuccessful efforts of a literary nature, she wrote Indiana, which immediately made her success.  Her articles were sought by the journals, and from about 1830 her life was that of the average artist and writer of the time.  Her relations with Chopin and Alfred de Musset are too well known to require repetition.  After 1850 she retired to her home, the Chateau de Nohant, where she enjoyed the companionship of her son, her daughter-in-law, and her grandchildren; she died there in 1876.

To appreciate her works, it is more important to study her nature than her career.  This has been admirably done by the Comte d’Haussonville.  George Sand is said to have possessed a dual nature, which seemed to contradict itself, but which explains her works—­a dreamy and meditative, and a lively, frolicsome nature; the first might throw light upon her religious crisis, the second, upon her social side.  The combination of these two phases caused the numerous conflicts of opinions and doctrines, extending her knowledge and inciting her curiosity; the not infrequent result was an intellectual and moral bewilderment and the deepest melancholy, from which she with great difficulty freed herself.  Because of these peculiarities she was constantly agitated, her strongly reflective nature keeping her awake to all important questions of the day.

Her intellectual development may be traced in her works, which, from 1830 to 1840, were personal, lyrical, spontaneous—­a direct flow from inspiration, issuing from a common source of emotions and personal sorrows, being the expressions of her habitual reflections, of her moral agitations, of her real and imaginary sufferings.  These first works were a protest against the tyranny of marriage, and expressed her conception of a woman in love—­a love profound and naive, exalted and sincere, passionate and chaste:  such is pictured in Indiana.  In Valentine she portrays the impious and unfortunate marriage that the sacrilegious conventions of the world have imposed, and the results issuing therefrom.  In all of these early works are seen an inventiveness, a lively allure, an exquisite style, a freshness and brilliancy, finesse and grace; but they show an undisciplined talent, giving vent to feelings that her unbounded enthusiasm would not allow to be checked—­there is emotion, but no system.

In her second period, from about 1840 to 1848, her reflection and emotion combined produced a system and theories.  The higher problems took stronger hold on her as she matured; philosophy and religious science in their deeper phases excited her emotive faculties, which threw out a mere echo of what she had heard and studied.  Her inspiration thus came from without, throwing out those endless declamatory outbursts which we meet in Consuelo and in Comtesse de Rudolstadt.  These theory-novels were soon followed by novels dealing with social problems, now and then relieved by delightful idyllics such as La Mare au Diable and Francois le Champi.  This third tendency M. d’Haussonville considers the least successful.