"François the waif" by George Sand (translated by Jane Minot Sedgwick). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.

The Country Waif (Franöoise le Champi) is the second of the three pastoral novels which rank along with George Sand's autobiographical writing as her finest work. Although simple in themselves, these tales have behind them much of the complex experience of her extraordinary life. As Mrs. Zimmerman writes in the introduction, they reflect Sand's "youthful romanticism, her later championing of the working classes, and her desire to record in fiction that was both poetic and factual the lives of the people and the region she knew best." Set in the countryside of the author's native province of Berry, The Country Waif tells the story of Franöois, an orphan boy placed in a rural foster home, and Madeline, the miller's wife who befriends him. Sand's contemporary, Turgenev, wrote that it was "in her best manner, simple, true, affecting." The book has been admired by writers as diverse as Willa Cather (she found it "supremely beautiful") and Andrä Malraux, who considered it a masterpiece. As well as examining the setting, language, and narrative mode of the novel, the introduction looks at Sand's life, in part from the feminist perspective, with attention to the sociopolitical background of the post-Napoleonic era, when Aurore Dudevant felt impelled to rebel against her status as a country wife and to become George Sand.