Sand also calls into question Rousseau's ideal version of the female education as described in his novel Emile, namely, training women for domesticity and the home.

When his cousin Edmée is held captive by Bernard's "family", he helps her escape, but elicits a promise of marriage from her by threatening rape.

In keeping with Sand's interest in equality, Mauprat depicts a new type of literary figure, the peasant visionary Patience.

[9] Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky praised the novel for its "profound and poetic idea, that of a strong, intelligent, beautiful woman raising a man above his bestial passions".

According to Columbia University's Lesley Singer Herrmann, Belinsky's opinion of Mauprat "set the tone for Sand's reception in Russia in the 1840s and 50s, where she was proclaimed the 'advocate of women as Schiller had been the advocate of humanity.

Thomson stated that "the parallels and connections are there in profusion and I myself have little doubt that Mauprat formed part of the literary – and therefore, living – experience on which Emily Brontë drew.