George Sand

George Sand was the pen name of Amantine Aurore Dupin, a French novelist who left her husband at twenty-seven, wore men's clothes to get into places women could not, and smoked in public when that alone was a scandal. She wrote some seventy novels and had famous affairs with Musset and Chopin, whom she nursed for years. Dostoevsky, Whitman and Flaubert all revered her.