Cigar smoking, gender-nonconforming, bisexual, polyamorous - and the intellectual equal of any man - George Sand was the beating heart of the Paris literary scene. Award-winning Fiona Sampson MBE reassesses this uniquely modern figure.

Born Aurore Dupin in 1804, by the time she was thirty she was internationally renowned as George Sand, her novels out-selling Victor Hugo in the English language. Soon, the legend of Sand herself - cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous - scandalised Paris, seeming to break every rule set for women in polite society.

What can we learn from the way she lived? Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy, or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day - from Frederic Chopin to Gustave Flaubert - form part of her dialogue with the world, a dialogue intrinsic to writing itself?

In Becoming George, award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates Sand as an intellectual and artistic giant, the beating heart of French literature in the nineteenth century. For too long underestimated, though never by her peers, she speaks to us as a figure in some ways centuries ahead of her time.