Indiana by George Sands

genre: fiction

Indiana, the unhappily wed and unwell resident of a lovely country estate on the outskirts of Paris.  Her much older and overbearing husband makes her dull life even more underwhelming and her days are nothing but monotony.  She is so young and so lovely but doesn't care about that at all because her life is just being trapped in a loveless marriage - but then, one fateful night, a young man sneaks in to have a rendezvous with Indiana's lady's maid and Indiana's life is spun on its head, and NOT in a good way.

Told from the persepctive of a third person narrator, we get to witness the interior life of both Indiana and that infamous young man, Raymon.  It's a story of marriage and a story just dripping with the horrid status of women's rights within the society of the contemporary time period (1820s).  It's melodramatic and occasionally lovely.  Neither of these two main characters is particularly endearing and it took me a really long time to care about what happened to them but by the last 2/3 I was sufficiently invested, even if it seemed like we skipped big chunks of time far more at the end of the book than at the beginning.  I felt pity for Indiana sometimes, truly, to be so young and to know you have so little control over your life - it's hard to know where to start blaming her for her mistakes.  But as a story of ill-fated love or of second (third?) chances or of the power of knowing you can choose something for yourself, there is some good stuff in here.  Even if it's a big of a slog to get there.