SOURCE: “Where the Devil Leads: Peasant Superstitions in George Sand's Petite Fadette and Droste-Hülshoff's Judenbuche,” in Neohelicon, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1983, pp. 221-38.

In the following essay, Godwin-Jones details peasant superstitions related to the Devil in representative works by George Sand and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.

Both George Sand and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff belonged to aristocratic families who owned landed estates. Each spent the majority of her youth in the country and remained firmly attached to the particular region in which she was brought up, Sand in Berry, Droste in Westphalia. Both women ultimately rejected the lure of the cities, the centers of literary culture, preferring to reside at their country estates. This love of their native regions is reflected in the best-known works of each woman. Yet the reflection in each case is radically different. This is a result of diametrically opposed intellectual backgrounds and socio-political beliefs...