George Sand in the Opinion of Her Peers

The French literary historian, Sainte-Beuve, who knew Sand, argued that he couldn’t imagine anything worse than an affair with a woman writer – because your private life would always end up in print.

This is why Oscar Wilde, commenting at the end of the 19th century, could write, “Like Goethe, George Sand had to live her romances before she could write them.” Wilde knew of what he wrote for he did the same. Others have been more hostile. Baudelaire called her "stupid, heavy and garrulous" while Nietzsche dismissed her as "a cow that writes." One biographer described her as having "huge devouring black eyes who could be as mute and mysterious as the Sphinx."

The same kind of malicious sexism seems to be directed at Taylor Swift these days.