Indiana

Published in 1832, Indiana was the first novel George Sand wrote independently and the work that brought her to prominence in French literary life. Its heroine, a young Creole woman raised on Île Bourbon (now Réunion), is trapped in a loveless marriage to the authoritarian Colonel Delmare and becomes vulnerable to the attentions of Raymon de Ramière, a charming but unreliable aristocrat. Against the conventions of Restoration France, Indiana’s longing for tenderness and freedom exposes the narrow choices available to women whose lives are governed by marriage, reputation and social duty.

Combining romantic intensity with a penetrating critique of social inequality, Sand’s novel asks whether love can offer genuine liberation in a society that denies women independence over their own lives. Its concern with the unequal power of men and women extends beyond the domestic sphere, touching on class, colonialism and the moral authority of established institutions. Bold in its sympathy for a woman’s rebellion against an unjust order, Indiana helped establish Sand as one of nineteenth-century France’s most consequential novelists and remains an important early work in the history of feminist literature.

From the book

“The more dearly it costs her to commit the crime, the more she will have deserved at the hands of the man she loves.”

— George Sand, Indiana

On Indiana

“A world that is true, living, our own.”

— Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains (1832), on Indiana