Fiona Sampson and Lara Feigel chaired by Lucy Atkins

Poet and biographer Fiona Sampson discusses with writer and academic Professor Lara Feigel the life and work of the 19th-century French novelist George Sand, who scandalised Paris and seemed to break every rule for women in polite society.

Sand outsold Victor Hugo in English translation, and her cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuity scandalised society. Sampson asks what we can learn from the way she lived. Was it an act of courage and a declaration of autonomy? Or were her relationships with the likes of Chopin and Flaubert part of her dialogue with the world and intrinsic to her writing?  Sampson says Sand was an intellectual and artistic giant centuries ahead of her time. Sand also managed to win a dramatic custody case for her two children, at a time when very few women won custody cases. In Custody: The Secret History of Mothers, Feigel tells this extraordinary story and asks what Sand’s case reveals about the larger culture.

Sampson has been shortlisted twice for the T S Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She is a critic and editor and regular contributor to the Guardian, Irish Times, Sunday Times, Independent and the Times Literary Supplement.

Feigel is professor of modern literature and culture at King’s College London and author of works of non-fiction, including The Bitter Taste of Victory and Free Woman, and of a novel, The Group.

Discussions are chaired by critic and novelist Lucy Atkins, author of Magpie Lane.