Drawn from George Sand’s private journals and edited and translated from the French by Marie Jenney Howe, The Intimate Journal catches Sand away from the monumental nineteenth-century literary persona.

At its centre is the journal addressed to Alfred de Musset, written through the aftermath of their famously destructive love affair: desire, humiliation, moral argument, jealousy and self-interrogation all arrive without much interest in behaving like retrospective memoir. 

Sand moves easily from intimate grievance into attacks on hypocrisy and masculine authority, then back into the compromised business of loving particular people. The result is a strange hybrid of diary, confession, correspondence and philosophical fragment: nineteenth-century interiority before anyone had invented a respectable shelf for it.

This 1977 Cassandra Editions reprint reproduces Marie Jenney Howe’s 1929 English edition. The previous owner has also added a handwritten Dorothy Parker verse to the front blank — not exactly provenance of historical consequence, but an excellent accidental paratext.

Cassandra Editions / Academy Press Limited, 1977. Paperback reprint of the 1929 edition. Edited and translated by Marie Jenney Howe. Moderate general wear: rubbing, creasing and edgewear to covers, softened corners, age-toning internally. Handwritten Dorothy Parker verse to front blank. Binding intact.