Indiana: A New Translation
Indiana is young, Creole-born, and married to a man she does not love - a retired colonel who exercises the authority that French law gives him over his wife with the matter-of-fact completeness of someone who has never thought to question it. Into her circumscribed life comes Raymon de Rami re: charming, ardent, entirely convincing in his devotion, and entirely unable, when it matters, to be what he has promised to be.
George Sand's Indiana, published in 1832, was a sensation from its first appearance - praised by the leading critics of the day, read throughout France, and recognized immediately as something new: a novel that used the conventions of romantic fiction to conduct a precise and unsparing investigation of the conditions of women's lives. The love story is real. The critique running beneath it is relentless.
At its center is a woman who is failed, systematically, by every institution her world offers her - marriage, the law, romantic love itself - and who must find, in the ruins of those failures, something that actually holds. Around her, Sand constructs one of the most carefully assembled triangles in nineteenth-century fiction: a husband who owns, a lover who performs, and a third figure who has been present since the first page, loving without display, waiting to be seen.
Written in a matter of weeks by a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had just claimed her own independence and needed urgently to say why it mattered, Indiana is the novel that created George Sand - and that remains, nearly two centuries later, as clear-eyed and as necessary as the morning it was finished.
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