In Steven’s version of the couple’s experiences in Mallorca, their stay’s presented from the perspective of Blanca, a centuries-old spirit of a teenage girl who died in childbirth, who lusts after Sand. Sand later documented her version of this prolonged holiday/abortive “honeymoon” in Un hiver à Majorque. They were routinely ripped off by the locals, The Charterhouse was damp, and the climate hideously cold and stormy. No standard lodging house would accept their custom and they were forced to rent barely-habitable cells in a former monastery The Charterhouse. Their stay was an unmitigated disaster, Sand’s habit of dressing in men’s attire, together with the news that the couple weren't married was viewed as scandalous by the deeply conservative, Catholic locals, and this hostility intensified once it became clear that Chopin was harbouring a deadly infectious disease. So, they set off with Sand’s two children in tow. When Sand and Chopin became lovers, he was already showing signs of the tuberculosis that would eventually destroy his health, so in 1838, the couple travelled to a remote area of Mallorca, Valldemossa, in the belief that sun and fresh air would aid Chopin’s recovery.
It revolves around an episode in the lives of controversial writer George Sand (Aurore Dupin) and composer Frédéric Chopin. Nell Stevens’s debut novel combines fictionalised biography with an unusual variation on a ghost story. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training).Ĭharming, original, and emotionally moving - gorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and life after death. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants.īlanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing-a teenage ghost pining for a woman who can’t see her and doesn’t know she exists. In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. A playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sands.
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