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This historical novel about George Sand is a real slow burner, and unfortunately doesn’t get much better as it goes along. Berg makes the mistake of trying to be too comprehensive about Sand’s life; it would be better to just choose illustrative vignettes or representative love affairs (e.g. with Chopin) rather than include them all. There are two different timelines, 1831�1876 and 1804�1831, such that they eventually meet up and then the one continues the story through to the end, but together they’re still just a chronological slog.

A question most people will be pondering is: why the male name and persona? Berg has a few theories. First, Sand had a sense of needing to make up for the death of her baby brother. Second, as a young reporter in Paris she could get cheap theater tickets (standing or benches), whereas women could only take box seats. Lastly, male dress conferred both anonymity and liberty: “There was an expansive freedom, not to say power, in wearing men’s clothes.�

A few tense mother–daughter relationships provide the novel’s thematic patterns. After her husband’s death, Sand’s prostitute mother left her with her mother-in-law in the French countryside (Nohant) to go to Paris with her other daughter. The irony was that Sand repeated her mother’s mistake by leaving her children with her husband, Casimir, so she could go to Paris to work and take lovers. She had a good relationship with her son, Maurice, but her daughter Solange was very difficult and pretty much hated her.

Many of Sand’s lovers were mercurial, immature young men. They were artistic but lazy and dependent, and Sand took care of them as if they were additional children. With actress Marie Dorval, however, Berg posits that Sand found her one true love. Whether this amounts to a hypothesis that Sand is bisexual, I’m not sure. As the title suggests, Berg emphasizes Sand’s devotion to the idea of love: “what consumed me most was the search for the absolute in love. First it was my mother I dedicated myself to, then God [a short time in a convent school], then a series of lovers...What we want is not the object of our desire but desire itself...One is not living when one does not use the parts of oneself that are most vital, most especially the need to love and be loved.�

The Dream Lover reminded me a bit of some of Julian Barnes’s French-set historical fiction, or maybe Lisette’s List, but the first-person narration lacks verve. Berg has loads of previous work, but most looks like chick lit, so I don’t think I’m tempted to try it. Likewise, this hasn’t really inspired me to seek out Sand’s fiction; I imagine I’d find it dated and melodramatic compared to Gustave Flaubert et al. (though I will read the one paperback of hers I think I have on shelf, Majorca).