The Private Secretary: A New Translation
A private secretary lives at the closest possible distance from another person's life: present at the intimate correspondence, trusted with the private arrangements, admitted to the rooms from which the world is generally excluded - and yet always, definitively, on the wrong side of the line that separates the confidant from the equal.
George Sand knew that distance. She had spent her adult life navigating the space between the intellectual companionship she could form and the formal subordination that was the condition of every such companionship - between the freedom she could claim in practice and the freedom the law would not recognize. When she published The Private Secretary in 1833 - the year after Indiana and Valentine had made her one of the most celebrated new voices in French literature - she was writing from that knowledge, and with the urgency of a writer who had found, at last, the form adequate to what she needed to say.
This is George Sand in her earliest and most searching mode: exploring the territories of proximity and power, of intimacy and hierarchy, of the social arrangements that distribute freedom so unevenly between the people who inhabit them. It is a novel about what it means to know someone completely and to remain, by the rules of the world that contains you both, perpetually outside.
Sharp, warm, and as politically precise as everything Sand wrote in these extraordinary early years.
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