Aurore dudevant biography of william shakespeare
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Shakespeare in France
After an idle ungdom, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until , when his play Henri III () became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1, volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written bygd him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers () was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo () from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death. George Sand began life as Aurore Dupin, the
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Author of more than fifty novels, George Sand (Amandine Lucile Aurore Dudevant) was perhaps the most famous woman writer in nineteenth-century France, certainly the most prolific. Her first novel, Indiana (), prepared the stage for much of her later work in its unconventional portrait of an unhappy wife who tries to free herself from the prison of marriage and a society that emphasized male dominance. Her subsequent novels shocked her nineteenth-century readers with frank studies of women's sexual feelings and the promotion of women's rights. Her iconoclastic themes in her novels were only enhanced bygd her unconventional behavior: leaving her husband and living with other men, occasionally dressing in men's clothing, smoking cigars. Her literary reputation was worldwide in the s, and this seems to have been the time when Whitman first read her Consuelo (). Whitman had a profound interest in French romantic novelists, and as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he especially reviewed
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George Sand (Thomas )/Chapter 2
GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE.
Aurore Dupin was now fifteen, and so far, though somewhat peculiarly situated, she and her life had presented no very extraordinary features, nor promise of the same. Her energies had flowed into a variety of channels, and manifestly clever and accustomed to take the lead though she might be, no one, least of all herself, seems to have thought of regarding her as a wonder. The Lady Superior of the Couvent des Anglaises, who called her "Still Waters," had perhaps an inkling of something more than met the eye, existent in this pupil. But a dozen years were yet to elapse before the moment came when she was to start life afresh for herself on a footing of independence and literary enterprise, and by her first published attempts raise her name at once above the names of the mass of her fellow-creatures.
Old Madame Dupin, warned by failing health that her end was not far off, would gladly have first assur