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Updated: June 24, 2025
This passage beginning "Day after day" and closing with the quotation is not in F of F A, but it is in S-R fr. The quotation is from The Captain by John Fletcher and a collaborator, possibly Massinger. These lines from Act I, Sc. 3 are part of a speech by Lelia addressed to her lover. Later in the play Lelia attempts to seduce her father possibly a reason for Mary's selection of the lines.
She had then just finished "Lelia," that strange and powerful creation, in which she embodied all her hatred of the forms and tyrannies of society, her craving for an impossible social ideal, her tempestuous hopes and desires, in such startling types. Exhausted by the struggle, she panted for the rest and luxury of a companionship in which both brain and heart could find sympathy.
Feminine curiosity wished to read them, but only Don Horacio Febrer, Jaime's grandfather, received books in Majorca, and the small volumes of "Indiana" and "Lelia," belonging to him, passed from hand to hand without being understood by their readers. A married woman who wrote books and lived with a man who was not her husband!
"Lélia is a fancy-type," so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry, Jules Néraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological pursuits she had often shared: "it is not like you you who are merry, dance the bourrée, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves.
Days of Valentine, many of us may in like manner say, days of Valentine, days of Lélia , days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our memory and haunt the ear with their cadences!
In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical works of her first period Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and the rest we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley when, fifteen years earlier, he with Mary Godwin joined Byron and Jane Clairmont in Switzerland young revoltes, all of them, nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic novels.
Of Jules Sandeau she speaks only as of the associate of a literary enterprise; the world accords him a much nearer relation to her; but upon this point she cannot, naturally, be either explicit or implicit. One thing is certain: she was a hard worker, and did with her might what her hand found to do. She wrote "Indiana," "Lelia," "Valentine," and had fame and money at will.
She herself felt and she made readers feel, as in "Lelia," that outward limitations and hindering circumstances were as nothing compared to the great fact of freedom within, freedom of heart and soul and mind from "the enthralment of the actual." We are free; it is a great thing to be as sure and as proud of it as St. Paul was of having been "Free born."
Hailed by her admirers as a sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic morality enhancing her celebrity not a little. Lélia, a lyrical novel an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand.
She was staggered by the infinity of evil, misery, and injustice, which dwellers in great cities are not allowed to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal mystery of suffering and wrong predominant in a world on the beneficence of whose Supreme Power all her faiths were founded. Her mental revolt and suffering found vent in Lélia, which it was an immense relief to her to write.
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