The search for a liveable life: George Sand, scandal and queer possibility in Briefly, A Delicious Life

This essay reads Nell Stevens’s 2022 novel Briefly, A Delicious Life - a neo-Victorian reimagining of George Sand’s winter stay on the island on Mallorca with Frédéric Chopin in 1838-39 - in relation to the questions of queer liveability posed by Judith Butler in Undoing Gender (2004) and Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). It examines the way that the novel engages with genderqueer representations of and by Sand from the nineteenth century, and highlights the queerness that can exist within nominally heterosexual family groupings. It argues that Stevens’s novel frames the Mallorcan sojourn in terms of a search for a queer homeland – a quest that is curtailed by the scandalised reaction of the local population to Sand’s non-conformity. Despite this, I conclude, Briefly, A Delicious Life can be read as a novel of queer possibility: one that is committed to imagining a liveable life for those who dis-identify with rigid gender binaries.