Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a brilliant thinker, writer, Existentialist, partner of Jean Paul Sartre, and more. Generally I am confining my blogs to people from the U.S. but today's
New York Times Book Review included
a review of a book about the Existentialists. Biography.com opens with
"French writer Simone de Beauvoir laid the foundation for the modern feminist movement. Also an existentialist philosopher, she had a romance with Jean-Paul Sartre." While only a fairly primitive website such as biography.com would be able to juxtapose two such disparate thoughts, the fact is Simone de Beauvoir was as respected and nearly treated with equal regard as the men with whom she collaborated.
From Britannica - "Simone de Beauvoir, in full Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir (born Jan. 9, 1908,
Paris,
France—died April 14, 1986, Paris), French writer and
feminist, a member of the intellectual fellowship of philosopher-writers who have given a literary transcription to the themes of
Existentialism. She is known primarily for her treatise Le Deuxième Sexe,2 vol. (1949;
The Second Sex), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the “eternal feminine.” This seminal work became a classic of feminist
literature."
"Schooled in private institutions, de Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne, where, in 1929, she passed her agrégation in
philosophy and met
Jean-Paul Sartre, beginning a lifelong association with him. She taught at a number of schools (1931–43) before turning to
writing for her livelihood. In 1945 she and Sartre founded and began editing Le Temps modernes, a monthly review."
"Her novels expound the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer’s commitment to the times. L’Invitée (1943; She Came To Stay) describes the subtle destruction of a couple’s relationship brought about by a young girl’s prolonged stay in their home; it also treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to “the other,” each individual conscience being fundamentally a predator to another. Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is Les Mandarins (1954;
The Mandarins), for which she won the
Prix Goncourt. It is a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their “mandarin” (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including Pour une Morale de l’ambiguité (1947; The Ethics of Ambiguity); travel books on
China (La Longue Marche: essai sur la Chine [1957]; The Long March) and the
United States (L’Amérique au jour de jour [1948]; America Day by Day); and a number of essays, some of them book-length, the best known of which is The Second Sex. In 2009 a new English-language translation of The Second Sex was published, making the entire original text available to English-speaking readers for the first time; the earlier translation (1953) had been severely edited."
“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
―
Simone de Beauvoir
"Several volumes of her work are devoted to
autobiography. These include Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958;
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), La Force de l’âge (1960;
The Prime of Life), La Force des choses (1963; Force of Circumstance), and Tout compte fait (1972; All Said and Done). This body of work, beyond its personal interest, constitutes a clear and telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s.
"In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of
aging, which she addressed in Une Mort très douce (1964; A Very Easy Death), on her mother’s death in a hospital, and in La Vieillesse (1970; Old Age), a bitter reflection on society’s indifference to the elderly. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie des adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre’s last years. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, by Deirdre Bair, appeared in 1990. Carole Seymour-Jones’s A Dangerous Liaison(2008), a double biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre, explores the unorthodox long-term relationship between the two.
"Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality."
L'Invitée (1943) (English –
She Came to Stay) [novel]
Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) [nonfiction]
Le Sang des autres (1945) (English –
The Blood of Others) [novel]
Who Shall Die? (1945)
Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946) (English –
All Men Are Mortal) [novel]
Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947) (English –
The Ethics of Ambiguity) [nonfiction]
Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) (English –
The Second Sex) [nonfiction]
L'Amérique au jour le jour (1954) (English – America Day by Day)
Les Mandarins (1954) (English -
The Mandarins) [novel]
Must We Burn Sade? (1955)
The Long March (1957) [nonfiction]
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
The Prime of Life (1960)
Force of Circumstance (1963)
A Very Easy Death (1964)
Les Belles Images (1966) [novel]
The Woman Destroyed (1967) [novel]
The Coming of Age (1970) [nonfiction]
All Said and Done (1972)
When Things of the Spirit Come First (1979) [novel]
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981)
Letters to Sartre (1990)
Journal de guerre, Sept 1939–Jan 1941 (1990); English - Wartime Diary (2009)
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren (1998)
Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926–27 (2006)
Cahiers de jeunesse, 1926–1930 (2008)
