Author:

Abstract

Twentieth-century book and literary historians have tended to seriously underestimate women‟s participation in the nineteenth-century literary field. Thanks to different digital and online tools it becomes now possible to get a better understanding of their presence as authors. This is demonstrated in the present article, where the case „George Sand as received in nineteenth-century Netherlands‟ is used as an example. In particular it is shown that there has been, up to recently, too much reliance on critical articles published in the nineteenth-century literary press. Dutch critics publishing negative comments on George Sand‟s works will most often have had the intention to combat her actual success with Dutch readers and her possible influence on them. And those literary reviews refraining from publishing articles on her work show, by the frequency of their mentioning Sand‟s name, that she was in fact very present in the cultural repertoire of the nineteenth-century Netherlands.

Keywords: digitalisering,  receptie-onderzoek,  George Sand,  Franse literatuur,  vrouwelijke schrijvers,  digitization,  reception,  George Sand,  French literature,  women‟s writing