When George Sand Hit the Town in Men’s Clothes

You’d be hard put to call it a feminist image exactly. In this illustration for a gossip column printed sometime in 1831-2, the writer George Sand is on the protective, even chivalrous arm of a man, but she’s also dressed in men’s clothes. She carries them off well, with a swaggering cane, and shiny toes under trouser cuffs that fall just so (they must be tailored, not borrowed). The skirt of her frock coat flares cutely and she appears to have been buttoned into some sort of wasp-waist corset, even if the artist has exaggerated this line a little.

George Sand (r) dressed as a student, and her lover Jules Sandeau in Paris, c. 1831, engraving by Paul Gavarni (1804-1866) Actually Paul Gavarni, who executes this image, probably isn’t exaggerating very much. He’s certainly got the writer’s sloping shoulders right. And the wasp waist will feature in all her future portraits until it suddenly vanishes, in photographs taken by Pierre Ambroise Richebourg, in 1852. Then all at once she’ll turn into a little dumpling, the sort of woman who may not quite have got her figure back after having kids. And the voluminous frocks of her matronhood may conceal other discomforts: distension, flatulence. For in the last years of her life she will be troubled by terrible digestion and chronic bowel problems set off by a bout of grave illness, diagnosed as typhoid fever and gall-bladder disease, in the autumn of 1860.

A lifetime of excessively tight corsets can’t be good for any of this. But here, near the start of her time in literary Paris, the new literary star is young and slim, and expects to stay that way forever. She carries herself with a confidence that perhaps makes her some sort of match for the artist: Gavarni is rakishly good-looking and just a few months older than his subject. He too has arrived from the French provinces to break into artistic, intellectual Paris at a slightly older age than usual; he too is just starting out. This engraving is among the first of his soon-to-be famous sketches of metropolitan mores.

She does not lack a sex. The clothes she wears are just one of the ways in which a woman choosing to play by her own rules can appear.

If there is anything feminist to be found in the scene he’s composed, it’s the boldness with which Sand strolls through the dress circle of a theatre. She’s the only woman here, and men turn to look at her. It doesn’t do to imagine what they’re thinking. But perhaps she knows anyway, thanks to years of living with Hippolyte and Casimir, neither of them models of politesse and restraint. When I look at this picture, in which, with her hair curling from under the brim of her top hat, she is clearly not pretending actually to be a man, I see again in her costume not the sexual fetishisation of her body that’s usually assumed by those around her (and those who will come after), but her refusal of that fetishisation. Count me out, announce the smart tailoring, the neatly crossed black silk bandana. I’m not playing your game.

Which is not to say that this early incarnation of Sand is, as a future cartoon will have it, sexless:

If this portrait of George Sand

Leaves the mind a bit perplexed

It’s because genius is abstract and

As we know has no sex.

The rhyme comes from a caricature which Alcide-Joseph Lorentz will publish in 1842 (after he’s benefited from an early commission to provide the frontispiece for one of his target’s first books). He will title it “Comedy Mirror,” and it does indeed fail accurately to reflect George Sand, by then fully grown into her famous pseudonym. She does not lack a sex. The clothes she wears are just one of the ways in which a woman choosing to play by her own rules can appear.

Sand will already have said as much herself in May 1835, in a letter to the Saint-Simonist Adolphe Guéroult. As a representative of that movement in political economy which gainsays traditional social forms, instead seeing a world divided into parasitic “idlers” and “industrial” workers of all kinds, including writers, he has been fishing for closer collaboration with someone he understands as a fellow utopian and social revolutionary. At the same time (gender being as usual the protected exception) he’s criticized her temerity in wearing men’s clothes. But, she explains in her response, it’s precisely men’s privileges, not their identity, that she wishes to assume:

If I were a boy, I would willingly make a stroke with a sword here or there, and letters the rest of the time. Not being a boy, I do without the sword and keep the pen […] and my friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress. […] Be reassured, I don’t aspire to the dignity of man. It seems to me too laughable to be much preferable to the servility of woman. But I claim to possess, today and forever, the superb and complete independence which you alone believe you have the right to enjoy. […] So take me for a man or a woman as you wish.

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From Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson. Copyright © 2026 by Fiona Sampson. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.