In 1831 Paris, a woman needed a police permit to legally wear trousers. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin got one, put on men’s coats and a cravat, smoked cigars in public, and walked into theaters and political gatherings barred to women. Writing as George Sand, she became the most popular writer in Europe, outselling Victor Hugo and Balzac. This episode treats her life as a master class in identity design.

We look at her aristocratic upbringing at Nohant, the legal minefield of leaving a husband under the Napoleonic Code, the separation that won her custody and her estate, the birth of the pen name from a collaboration with Jules Sandeau, and the explosive novel Indiana. We explore how she and her peers played with the gendered grammar of French, her passionate relationship with actress Marie Dorval, the disastrous winter in Mallorca and creative summers at Nohant with Chopin, the family feud that ended that relationship, her role in the 1848 revolution, and her surprising reversal against the Paris Commune.

• Why the transvestite pass functioned as an all-access lanyard for 19th-century society
• How Sand code-switched between masculine and feminine grammar depending on the sphere of life
• The Dorval relationship that alarmed the men of the Parisian theater world
• Nohant as a 19th-century artist incubator and how Solange’s dowry dispute blew it apart
• Why history remembers her lovers more than her 70 novels and 120-volume bibliography