The Countess of Rudolstadt (Consuelo Sequel, Parts 1&2): A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798310525894)

She is a poor Spanish girl with a divine voice, an iron integrity, and no patience for the compromises the world demands of women. She will need all three.

The Countess of Rudolstadt, first serialized in La Revue Indépendante between June 1843 and February 1844, is the magnificent continuation of Consuelo - and together the two volumes form one of the grandest, most original novels of the nineteenth century. Where Consuelo carried its heroine from the opera houses of Venice through the castles of Bohemia and the imperial court of Maria Theresa in Vienna, The Countess of Rudolstadt plunges her into deeper waters still: the paranoid court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, a secret prison, and finally the initiation chambers of a clandestine society called the Invisibles, devoted to nothing less than the liberation of humanity from the forces of tyranny and dogma.

Sand weaves history and philosophy into adventure with audacious confidence. Frederick the Great, the mysterious Count of Saint-Germain, and the composer Porpora move through these pages alongside Consuelo and her great love, the visionary Count Albert de Rudolstadt, whose sanity has always existed at the border of ecstasy and madness. The Invisibles, Sand's fictional embodiment of an unbroken underground tradition of resistance running from the early Christians through the Hussite martyrs of Bohemia to the French Revolution, are not mere Gothic decoration: they are an argument about history, about freedom, and about who gets to carry the flame of liberty forward.

At the center of it all stands Consuelo - singular, uncompromising, and unforgettable: an artist who must decide whether her voice belongs to herself, to her art, or to the world that so desperately needs what she carries.

Written under the direct influence of the radical philosopher Pierre Leroux and widely considered the masterwork of George Sand's long career, The Countess of Rudolstadt is a novel of ideas that never forgets to be a novel of feeling - and a portrait of a woman who refuses, on every page, to be anything other than entirely herself.