Margaret Fuller and ‘the best living prose writer,’ George Sand: A Revisionist Account

Abstract

On reading the works of George Sand, Margaret Fuller wrote she was “tempted” to take her own writing in a new direction, which critical tradition assumes meant fiction-writing – a direction that Fuller did not take. Analysis of Fuller’s sometimes enigmatic comments on Sand, along with readings of the two writers in tandem, shows Fuller most engaged rather by the French author’s experiments with generic forms, her impassioned prose style, and her progressive social thought. The texts of the woman that Fuller judged to be in some ways the “best living prose writer” offered models of prose “painting” in the forms of visionary fragment, travelogue, and literary journalism that stimulated Fuller as she shaped her own form and style in her Dial fragments, Summer on the Lakes, and her Tribune journalism. Yet Fuller responded with more ambivalence than is usually acknowledged to Sand’s progressivism and emancipation from convention.