George Sand in the Netherlands

At the difference of what had happened in most other European countries, the Dutch seemed not to have appreciated the novels of George Sand, the most famous French female novelist of the 19th century. This has been the prevailing opinion up to the 1980s, in line with the evidently bad reputation of French romanticism in the Netherlands (Van den Berg 1995). So it seemed fully comprehensible that (the very most of) her work had not been immediately commented nor translated into Dutch. The tendency was (myself not excluded) to document this absence and make it understandable by quoting articles from the literary press, in which the journalist stated that "he would have preferred Mister Sand’s Lélia [1833] having remained near the Seine in Paris" (1835), or two years later that "one would not hear this critic saying that he should not have wished George Sand [..] to be put in prison". There was at least some approval of the author of this "soul-destructing sensuality" being conscious of her crimes, while she understood she had to hide behind a male pseudonym.

SvD, October 2009 (not finished)

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