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To the Reader

George Sand was a woman, born Aurore Dupin in Paris, France, in 1804. She took on a masculine name because, as an aspiring writer, she knew that her work would be more seriously considered if people thought the author was a man. She kept the name throughout her life, and became one of France’s most beloved and prolific writers, publishing more than eighty novels and plays.

The same freedom that Sand exercised in her writing, she applied to the rest of her life. In nineteenth-century France, women were expected to wear long dresses with tight corsets, but instead Sand wore men’s clothing, which allowed her to move more freely and to gain access to places otherwise restricted to women. She smoked cigars and dated whomever she wanted to date. Sand’s behavior may have been seen as unladylike, but she lived a liberated life at a time when liberation for women was in short supply.

Sand wrote What Flowers Say for her granddaughters only a few years before her death. She wanted to leave behind stories that would convey her strong belief in fantasy, to urge them to consider the unseen. Maybe it was Sand’s endless imagination that enabled her to create a revolutionary life. Believe and live free. That lesson is the gift she gave to her granddaughters with this collection, and that we are passing on to you, the reader, nearly one hundred and fifty years later.