George Sand was the pen name of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, a French novelist whose predilections for masculine dress and sexual openness were highly unconventional in her 19th century milieu.
Sand found men’s clothing more practical and comfortable than cumbersome gowns and corsets worn by women of the time, and her habit of wearing men’s garments in public earned her notoriety in Paris.
She also smoked in public, which was fairly unheard of for a woman at the time. Though she married at 18, she left her husband nine years later and went on to engage in a string of affairs.
She numbered such figures as Frederic Chopin and writer Jules Sandeau among her conquests. She wrote not only novels, but political essays that expressed her socialist beliefs, and even started her own newspaper.
*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/02/beach-reads-summer_n_7699708.html?ir=Women&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046
