The Marquis de Villemer

Boston: James Osgood and Co, 1871. First American edition, 4to (237 x 155mm), pp. [6], 130, [4]. Original green cloth, titled in gilt; the slightest bit of rubbing to the extremities, coated brown endpapers, light marginal dampstaining, else a superior copy and very good in the scarce green cloth (it was also bound in brown with no priority). Sand's early novels, particularly Lélia (1833) and Indiana (1832), interrogated conventional sexual identities and gender roles with such directness that the French government banned her works from public libraries in the 1830s, a prohibition that had the opposite of its intended effect, propelling Sand to international fame and leading to more sophisticated distribution practices and translations that characterized her later career. Marquis de Villemer, first published in French in 1861, belongs to this later phase and recounts the relationship between Caroline de Saint-Geneix, an impoverished aristocrat working as a companion, and the Marquis de Villemer, using this framework to explore merit versus inherited privilege and the constraints placed on women across class boundaries.