Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804 – 1876), best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist, and journalist. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin was born in Paris and known as Aurore in her family. Her parents were Captain Maurice Francois Dupin, from an aristocratic family, and Antoinette Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, who grew up in an impoverished working-class family, was orphaned at age 14, and supported herself through sex-work. Maurice died when Aurore was 4 and his mother, Mme Dupin de Francueil, gave Aurore’s mother, Sophie, a pension to stay away while she raised the child at her Nohant estate in the south-west of France. Having read Rousseau, Mme Dupin allowed her granddaughter free reign on the country estate, while also insisting she learn ‘proper’ French. When her grandmother decided that Aurore at age 13 had become too wild, she was sent off to live in a Paris convent. Aurore’s grandmother died when Aurore was 17. 12 months later she married Casimir Dudevant. In 1831, Aurore left her husband and moved to Paris. She began publishing articles and a novel with novelist Jules Sandeau under the name Jules Sand. A year later, she published her first solo novel, Indiana, under the name George Sand. One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era.