Gabriel

"Sand's [play], with its probing of masculinity and femininity, its reflection on male and female education, love and friendship, women and the law ... [is] an excellent addition to the MLA's Texts and Translations series."--Annabelle Rea, Occidental College. The handsome, heroic heir to a vast estate, raised as 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. ("An admirable ruse, indeed! To inspire in me the horror of women, only to throw it in my face and say: But this is what you are.") 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 play, 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. --Book Jacket.