George Sand

It's the birthday of the French novelist George Sand (books by this author), the pen name of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, who was born in Paris in 1804. Her father died when she was little, and her mother and grandmother didn't get along. She grew tired of being the "apple of discord" between them, and entered a convent when she was 14. She liked the contemplative life, but her grandmother was worried she would become a mystic, and so she was called home. She first wore men's clothes while horseback riding, at the suggestion of her tutor, and would gallop over the countryside in trousers and a loose blouse, reveling in nature and freedom.

She married the son of a baron at 19, and they had a son and a daughter, but Aurore grew bored with the life of a wife and moved to Paris when she was 27, leaving husband and children behind. She began writing articles to earn money, collaborated on a novel with her lover, Jules Sandeau, and wrote another on her own — Indiana (1832) — under the pen name of George Sand.
She rebelled against the conventional view of womanhood, and she took to wearing men's clothes and smoking cigars in public; she also took many lovers — among them poet Alfred de Musset and composer Frédéric Chopin. Her cause was not political equality for women, but equality in love and the right to behave and choose whom to love, as men enjoyed.