8. George Sand, Novelist (1804-1876)
Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Sand kept company with men (including Frederic Chopin)
throughout her whole life, but took to wearing men's clothing and adopting the clearly masculine name George Sand. Sand's claim to
fame was not only as a baroness, but as a novelist and memoir writer.
She also took to smoking tobacco in public, which, in Victorian
France, was considered just as manly as wearing men's clothes. Charles Beaudelaire was a particularly harsh detractor of not only
her social habits, but her work as well, claiming, �She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of
judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of manageresses and kept women�. The fact that there are men who could become
enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation.�
