"Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life"
March is Women's History Month and it commemorates and encourages the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in history. Annually, March 8 is International Women's Day which globally celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. Several such valiant women have inspired our most iconic scents, predominantly George Sand.
George Sand was the first woman in history to live by her pen. She was born Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and her pseudonym of George Sand would only later source inspiration from her contradictory upbringing and life of ambiguity. After all, as in life, no great novel is simple or easy.
Her first novel Rose et Blanche, edited by her lover, was published under Aurore’s first iteration of an androgynous pen name: J. Sand. Only men could write books. Next Aurore wrote Indiana, one of her best known works, in 1832. This time, however, her lover did not allow her to attribute it to “J. Sand,” due to his lack of contribution. Thus with the publication of Indiana, George Sand, one of the most influential French writers, was born.
In choosing the American spelling of George, Aurore embeds into her literary identity a sense of ambiguity. The novel itself centers on a woman in an unhappy marriage with a despotic husband. The heroine sought freedom like a man—with many lovers of her choosing. Sand’s heroine exhibits a feminist rebelliousness and a unique conceptual self-consciousness in discriminating the freedom of the mind and body of a woman.
Committed to writing, she found that literature was a powerful means to experiment with life, and express her political beliefs. In the tumultuous nineteenth-century, George Sand—woman, author, activist—built her own enduring legacy imbued with a unique multiplicity, modernity, and fearlessness. She will forever be on the right side of history.
1804 is an amber floral bouquet, in remembrance of George Sand’s bond uniting her with nature, warmed with heady spices and colored by sweet fruits.
