Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in Lélia, written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams! From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy.
It is significant that during these months, spent for the most part at La Châtre, we find her rewriting Lélia, trying, as she expressed her intention, "to transform this work of anger into a work of gentleness." Engelwald, a novel of some length on which she was engaged, was destined never to see the light.
"Valentine" was followed by "Lelia," a wonderful book indeed, gorgeous in eloquence, and rich in magnificent poetry: a regular topsyturvyfication of morality, a thieves' and prostitutes' apotheosis.
In Indiana she had portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; in Valentine, a helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; in Lélia and Jacques, the incurable Weltschmerz, heroism unvalued and wasted; in Leone Leoni, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a phenomenal scoundrel; in André, the wretchedness which a timid, selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all connected with it.
Neither Lélia nor Jacques combined the elements of lasting popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically inimical to religion and marriage an impression almost ludicrously at variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only recently begun to give way, in this country, to a juster estimate of its tendencies.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking