Lelia (English translation)

By George Sand

Book Overview

Regarded as one of Sand's best novels, LA(c)lia is an important document in the evolution of women's consciousness. Published in 1833, when Sand was 29, it stunned Victorians by advocating the same standard of morality for men and women and by suggesting that both the prostitute and the married woman were slaves to male desire. Sand also questioned monogamy, fidelity, and monastic celibacy. She later made an unsuccessful attempt to revise the book and to expunge its despair and skepticism. Although Sand wrote copiously, until recently only a handful of her books were available in English. This first English translation of LA(c)lia is an excellent rendering, capturing the raptures, the mysticism, and the nineteenth-century flavor ot its eternally fascinating subject.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253333180
• ISBN13: 9780253333186
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, Bloomington & London
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Poetic, magnificent, inspiring, dismal, different.

This novel although certainly different nevertheless it is exciting in its own peculiar way, very dramatic, intensely poetic, soft, charming and inviting; and yet by all means the heroine is despairing, terribly gloomy sort of character, suicidal and dark, but mostly she is out of this world, alike a visionary. The book is gentle, romantic in tragic sense of the word, Leilia is kind-hearted and yet doomed, reader grasps by own choice certainly. It is a finely written book, belonging perfectly to its Romantic 19th century era. It is dark, tragic, sentimental. But simply breath-taking. Can't be put down easily. Quite haunting.