Frederic Chopin's reputation as one of the Great Romantics endures, but as Benita Eisler reveals in her elegant and elegiac biography, the man was more complicated than his iconic image.

A classicist, conservative, and dandy who relished his conquest of Parisian society, the Polish emigre was for a while blessed with genius, acclaim, and the love of Europe's most infamous woman writer, George Sand. But by the age of 39, the man whose brilliant compositions had thrilled audiences in the most fashionable salons lay dying of consumption, penniless and abandoned by his lover. In the fall of...

Who was George Sand? She was the first famous Frenchwoman celebrated throughout Europe who wasn't either a saint or a king's mistress. She was also the first woman in Europe to become a best-selling novelist. But her fame is inseparable from her notoriety: the scandal of leaving a husband and child, setting up in Paris with an eighteen-year-old lover, liaisons and friendships with men of talent and even genius: de Musset, Chopin, Balzac, and Flaubert. Politically engaged, Sand was literally, "there at the revolution," those of 1831 and 1848, reporting, analyzing, denouncing, exhorting. She...