La mare au diable; The Country Waif (Francois le Champi)

1846年，喬治·桑就已經開始對田園生活感興趣。這一年她發表了著名的田園小說《魔沼》，全書沒有複雜的情節和冗長的理論闡述，而是自始至終充滿詩意。這部作品奠定了作家晚期創作的基調。

• La mare au diable 魔の沼（1846）
  • 杉捷夫訳.酣灯社,1948.
  • 浅見篤訳.晃文社,1948
  • 魔が沼 宇佐見英治訳.角川書店,1955
  • 魔の沼 ほか 持田明子訳.藤原書店,2005.1.

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The Country Waif

(Francois le Champi)

George Sand
Translated by Eirene Collis
Introduction by Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman

181 pages

About the Book

The Country Waif (Françoise le Champi) is the second of the three pastoral novels which rank along with George Sand's autobiographical writing as her finest work. Although simple in themselves, these tales have behind them much of the complex experience of her extraordinary life. As Mrs. Zimmerman writes in the introduction, they reflect Sand's "youthful romanticism, her later championing of the working classes, and her desire to record in fiction that was both poetic and factual the lives of the people and the region she knew best."

Set in the countryside of the author's native province of Berry, The Country Waif tells the story of François, an orphan boy placed in a rural foster home, and Madeline, the miller's wife who befriends him. Sand's contemporary, Turgenev, wrote that it was "in her best manner, simple, true, affecting." The book has been admired by writers as diverse as Willa Cather (she found it "supremely beautiful") and André Malraux, who considered it a masterpiece.

As well as examining the setting, language, and narrative mode of the novel, the introduction looks at Sand's life, in part from the feminist perspective, with attention to the sociopolitical background of the post-Napoleonic era, when Aurore Dudevant felt impelled to rebel against her status as a country wife and to become George Sand.