Simone de Beauvoir

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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.
  • BirthName: Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
    Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
    27

  • Nickname: Castor
    Brosman, Catharine Savage. Simone de Beauvoir Revisited. Twayne, 1991.
    12
    This nickname, the French word for Beaver, and so derived from a bilingual pun on SB 's surname, was first given her by René Maheu .

Black and white, head-and shoulders photo of Simone de Beauvoir (with someone else just visible behind her). She is wearing a heavy top with stripes over a white shirt. Her hair is mostly hidden by a patterned scarf worn turban-style.

Milestones

4 a.m., 9 January 1908

SB was born in Paris, in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translator Kirkup, James, Penguin, 2001.
5
She was the elder of two daughters.
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
27

June 1949

SB published the first part of her ground-breaking examination of the lives of women: Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), whose subtitle reads Les faits et les mythes (Facts and Myths).
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
155-7

November 1949

SB published the second part of Le deuxième sexe. Its title was L'expérience vécue, which might be translated The Lived Experience (though in fact the English rendering was different).
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
156

Spring 1953

Howard Madison Parshley 's translation of SB 's feminist analysis Le deuxième sexe appeared in both London and New York in a single volume as The Second Sex.
Moi, Toril. “The Adulteress Wife”. London Review of Books, Vol.
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, No. 3, 11 Feb. 2010, pp. 3-6.
3
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
160
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

14 April 1986

SB died while on a trip to the United States.
Brosman, Catharine Savage. Simone de Beauvoir Revisited. Twayne, 1991.
28

Biography

Birth and Family

4 a.m., 9 January 1908

SB was born in Paris, in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translator Kirkup, James, Penguin, 2001.
5
She was the elder of two daughters.
Francis, Claude, and Fernande Gontier. Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Gallimard, 1979.
27

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