Tags

,

Michael Orthofer from The Complete Review has posted a review of George Sand’s 1839 play, Gabriel. This 2010 translation is by Kathleen Robin Hart and Paul Fenouillet and is published by MLA Texts and Translations (ISBN: 9781603290784, Paperback, 220 pages).  It has an Introduction by Kathleen Robin Hart.

As Orthofer says in his review, Gabriel occupies an ambiguous space: it has the stage acts and scenes, stage directions and dialogue of a play but it’s 200 pages long, more like the length of a novel. A novel in dialogue perhaps?

Please visit The Complete Review to see Orthofer’s review and excerpts from other reviews.

This is the book description from the MLA website:


“An admirable ruse, indeed! To inspire in me the horror of females, only to throw it in my face and say: but this is what you are.”

The handsome, heroic heir to a vast estate, raised as a man to follow a man’s pursuits and to despise women, is devastated to learn at the age of seventeen that he is in fact a she. Gabriel courageously refuses to give up her male privileges, and her tragic struggle to work and fight and love in all the ways she knows how offers a window into the obstacles faced by George Sand, the prolific intellectual woman whom the popular press portrayed as a promiscuous, cigar-smoking oddity in trousers. “Strange that the most virile talent of our time should be a woman’s!” exclaimed a reviewer in 1838.

Kathleen Robin Hart’s introduction contextualizes the drama, discussing its relation to the theater of Sand’s day, the sentimental tradition, the subversive workings of carnival and masquerade, and the vein of literary androgyny in Romantic works.

Availability

Michael Orthofer is the brains behind the Complete Review and the Literary Saloon — and the author of The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2016), the perfect reference book for anyone interested in translated fiction.