"We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies," she said of 19th-century girls. Her best-selling novels were an indictment of arranged marriages and the female condition. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Today, we don't read her. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her private life, a scandalous reputation that pop culture has overblown.

A new biography of George Sand by British academic and poet Fiona Sampson reveals a thoroughly modern woman, who was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person. 

Creators & Guests

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Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Forget the cliché that women suddenly joined the workforce in the middle of the 20th century. They've been active in the economy as long as there's been an economy and not anecdotally. 

Guest: Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.

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