Ghosts in the Nursery: My Mother, My Subject, Myself

It has come to the point where Sol[ange] only inspires pity in me as a rational creature who's called my daughter, but who doesn't exist in reality. Not feeling her pain, I wonder if she isn't a dream in my life, the shadow of something that I thought I brought into the world that remains but a fantasy. (Correspondance X, March 1852, 790)

If I had George Sand's talent, I could begin all my letters like J.-J. Rousseau: “Miserable human beings that we are!” But I am not George Sand. (D'Heylli 1900, 71).

— November 1991. My mother and I go out to dinner to celebrate the contract I've just signed to write a biography of George Sand. We spend the meal discussing the sale of my mother's house, my brother's illness, my two sons: everything but my success.2 When we go to the ladies' room to refresh our lipstick, my mother brings up George Sand for the first time. She asks if I've ever seen the 1944 movie, A Song to Remember. Even though I say I've seen the film, she launches into a detailed description of Merle Oberon's “stunning” outfits. Not wanting to make waves, I don't tell my mother how much I hated this film in which Oberon—haughty, aloof, unsympathetic—plays Sand as indifferent to the poor and disempowered against Cornel Wilde's humbled, proletarian fantasy of Chopin. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Deep in sympathy with my subject, I feel my defensive dander rising.

Snapping her compact closed, my mother declares, “George Sand was certainly quite the snob.” I seethe with resentment that my mother, so sure of herself, gets Sand so wrong. Even the irreverent Oscar Wilde acknowledged that