Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Simone de Beauvoir
-
Standard Name: Beauvoir, Simone de
Birth Name: Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Nickname: Castor
Frenchwoman SB
has high standing as a philosopher of the twentieth-century existentialist school and is respected as a commentator on political and social issues (in effect, a contemporary historian), a novelist, and an autobiographer. She also published and had produced a play. But her outstanding (though lastingly controversial) achievement is her book on women, entitled in English The Second Sex, a foundational text for modern feminism.
The protagonist of this book, ageing Francesca Stubbs, is employed as an inspector of retirement homes. She and the other characters here, witnessing the ends' of friends' lives and approaching their own, make sense of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Zoë Fairbairns
In the course of the novel all three daughters and their mother make some contact with the women's liberation movement. For Christine this happens when she finds a hidden copy of Simone de Beauvoir
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
AO
's own contribution to this collection, A Brief History of Gender, invokes Simone de Beauvoir
at its outset. Its thesis is that gender is indispensable to analysis of the way men and women...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
AO
uses epigraphs from Simone de Beauvoir
's The Second Sex for the book as a whole and for each chapter. The title of each chapter until the last (In the Year 2000)...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
The title poem had been jotted in fragments during children's naps, brief hours in a library or at three am after rising with a wakeful child.
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
The collection followed on intensive reading of such...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Brookner
AB
relishes all this. But she writes with tactful sympathy of Germaine de Staël
and her younger, mostly unreciprocating lovers, and of Judith Gautier
(daughter of Théophile
), who deserves to be remembered not only...
Health
Adrienne Rich
After her third delivery she decided to be sterilised, though she met with social disapproval even from nurses caring for her in hospital: Had yourself spayed, did you?
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
She later recalled her isolation during...
Friends, Associates
Iris Murdoch
IM
received a fan letter from Eudora Welty
in 1956. She wrote to Simone de Beauvoir
, hoping to arrange a meeting, but de Beauvoir sais she would not be in Paris at the date...
Fictionalization
Lady Eleanor Butler
Among many less formal honours during the ladies' lifetimes, the most extraordinary was LEB
's award of a French, ancien régime, military medal: the Croix St Louis. It is shown in a famous portrait of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ann Oakley
Her first love-affair, technically unconsummated, began in January 1959 with a boy a little older than herself, and lasted three years. He gave her a copy of Simone de Beauvoir
's The Second Sex...
