George Sand’s novel “Gabriel” tells about the attempt to lead a life beyond the binary gender order. It originally appeared in 1839 and has now been translated into German for the first time.
The publication of the first translation of George Sand’s novel “Gabriel” into German has been well timed. It first appeared in installments in 1839 as a “dialogue novel” and yet seems to have miraculously taken center stage in current debates about social and biological gender: the eponymous character is assigned the male gender at birth for reasons of inheritance regulations, throughout the novel but she will always convincingly portray a woman.