André: A New Translation
The love between Andr and Genevi ve is real. The world they inhabit is not interested in that.
Published in 1835, Andr is one of George Sand's most intimate and precisely observed novels - a short, quietly devastating story of a cross-class love affair in the Berry countryside of central France, set against the rigid social architecture of early nineteenth-century French society. Andr is a young nobleman, sensitive and well-meaning but unable to defy the authority of his father. Genevi ve is a maker of artificial flowers - a grisette, a self-supporting working-class woman of unusual intelligence and moral seriousness, ill-fitted to the conventional life available to women of her station and no better suited to the one Andr might offer her.
Sand described the novel herself as an " tude de sentiment" - a study of feeling - and the phrase is perfectly judged. Andr does not thunder or declaim. It watches. It pays close attention to the way social convention operates not as abstract force but as lived daily pressure: in gossip, in a father's disapproval, in the gap between what two people feel and what the world will allow them to do about it. The result is a novel that is both a love story and a social indictment, both a character study of unusual specificity and a meditation on the structures that crush what is most genuine in people.
Written in Venice in the spring of 1834 and first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1835, Andr is often cited as the novel in which Sand's fiction begins its pivot toward the realism that would define her great pastoral novels of the 1840s. The setting - the Berry countryside she knew from childhood - is rendered with the intimate authority of someone who loves a place deeply enough to see it clearly.
From one of the most influential, courageous, and restlessly original writers of the nineteenth century, Andr is a small novel with a large and enduring truth at its heart: that the world's indifference to love is not a fact of nature, but a choice - and that the cost of that choice is always paid by those who can least afford it.
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