George Sand's many talents

George Sand's sewing kits and her sewn or embroidered creations are a reminder that sewing, embroidery and tapestry were activities inherent to her status as a woman in a century when social norms imposed activities differentiated by gender. Needlework, indispensable in any domestic household, was practiced in the context of clothing self-sufficiency, or as a means of creating and adorning all manner of objects, whether utilitarian or frivolous. George Sand herself got into the habit of making and embellishing her own clothes or those of her friends and family.

The intense theatrical practice developed in her home meant that she was involved in creating costumes for the Nohant actors and Maurice's puppets ; then, as a grandmother, she dressed her granddaughters' dolls.

The regularity of life in Nohant enabled George Sand to devote many hours to tapestry and embroidery. She herself was astonished by the amount of time she spent on it, but did not consider it wasted, since the mechanically repeated gestures allowed her mind to rest or escape.

She also enjoys spending time with her loved ones: during evenings, around the big living-room table, pulling the needle surrounded by her nearest and dearest, who are themselves busy reading or drawing, is a lovely excuse. In her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie, George Sand describes needlework as a recreation that sometimes enthralled her to the point of fever. She compares the effort women put into needlework to the labour of a peasant tilling the soil. Sewing, embroidery and tapestry also enabled the Sand woman, who dreamed so much of social equality, to become a worker in the same way as her mother, who, of modest origins, was a milliner in Paris.

Writing filled George Sand's life: it was her livelihood and the key to her independence . Only illness prevented her from writing, and she didn't put down the pen until June 1876, on the eve of her death. To her dizzying literary output must be added all manner of writings not intended for publication. She wrote thousands of letters, filled all sorts of notebooks with various annotations, hastily wrote dozens of scripts for the theater in Nohant... In covering the century of her writing, George Sand made use of an inestimable quantity of sheets and notebooks, stationery and envelopes, seals and wax loaves, ink and inkpots, blotters, quill pens and metal nibs, pen-holders...

She writes to the point of pain. She has always suffered from ophthalmic migraines, her eyesight often tiring. Her right arm and hand were sometimes ankylosed, and she suffered from rheumatic pains. In 1856, George Sand modified her writing style to relieve the pain in her hand. The operation was sudden, in the middle of writing a letter. She justified the change to her friend Pauline Viardot, explaining that "having a hand broken and contracted from fatigue", a "discovery" enabled her to make the change "to write much faster without daubing too much". George Sand switched from a very regular, tight, right-leaning handwriting to a rounder, broader, straight handwriting, which she kept until her death.

Writing for publication and to earn a living set George Sand apart from the women of her century. Writing was a man's job. Writing, therefore, enabled her to escape her condition as a woman, unlike needlework or drawing.