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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about George Sand’s novel Indiana. We discuss Sand—the most popular European novelist in her time—as exemplary of the fate of Romantic, idealist, popular, and women’s fiction after the later 19th- and early 20th-century dominance of realism, naturalism, and modernism. We consider Sand’s androgyny, progressivism, and feminism, and her reception by Anglophone writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. We explore Indiana as a novel in which realism and romance battle for aesthetic hegemony. We examine its place in the French politics of its time—the end of the Bourbon Restoration—and its own ideologies of gender, empire, nation, race, and class. We finally weigh the continued viability of the aesthetics of romance and idealism today. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: