So19 Reads: FIONA SAMPSON'S Becoming George

Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of her death, Sampson's new biography urges us to consider the woman born as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin—the writer who became known as George Sand—as what Rebecca Chao in the New York Times calls "an inventor of stories and also of the self." 

Sand's extraordinarily large literary output, works within which outsold French literary giants Hugo and Balzac during her lifetime, goes largely unread by non-academic readers today. But what Samson calls "her struggle to become herself" still feels both fascinating and relevant in its courage, its energy, and its endless (re)invention. 

"To become George Sand required will, imagination, chutzpah," Samson writes. "In an era when both revolutionary and traditional forces were pulling at the social fabric within which she lived, she managed to emerge as one of the boldest precursors of that perhaps final hope modernity holds out: that we might choose what we become." 

As she suggests, Sand's journey speaks both to the project of refining our own identities in a world that is constantly changing, and to the energy, persistence and resilience required to invent and reinvent ourselves.