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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
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... |
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... |
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... |
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? O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3. 22 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Deborah Levy | This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Iris Murdoch | |
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 | 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... |
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. O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3. 22 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Margaret Drabble | 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 | 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... |
Leisure and Society | Amabel Williams-Ellis | AWE
made her formal entry into society as a debutante, a change of status . . . important then for the young females of our sub-tribe. Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. 34 |
Literary responses | Olive Schreiner | The book is a landmark text. In an introduction to an edition of 1968, Doris Lessing
(who first read it when she was fourteen) identified it as one of the few rare books .... |
Reception | Hildegarde of Bingen | In recent times she has made a rapid transition from being unknown to being fashionable for her music and moderately well known for her writings. Her letters were edited in English translation in 1994 and... |
Timeline
1673
François Poulain (or Poullain) de la Barre
published at Paris his Cartesian treatise on gender equality, De l'égalité des deux sexes, which was translated into English four years later.
1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast
in Hanover Square, London.
1925
The Black US singer Josephine Baker
, aged nineteen, met with phenomenal success in Paris; she was seen as exemplifying the Jazz Age on one hand and a new racial consciousness on the other.
By July 1955
Françoise Sagan
, aged eighteen, repeated in England the previous year's sensational success in France of her novelBonjour Tristesse: the English version was by Irene Ash
.
28 November 1956
The film Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (And Woman . . . Was Created in the UK and And God Created Woman in the USA) had its French premiere. It starred...
By late 1963
The best-known novel by US author Mary McCarthy
, The Group, appeared in Britain. It traces the later lives of a number of graduates of Vassar
, then an all-women's college.
January 2010
The Simone de Beauvoir
prize for women's liberty was awarded jointly to two Chinese women, Guo Jianmei
, a lawyer, and Ai Xiaoming
, a film-maker and professor of comparative literature.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s rights falter in China”. Guardian Weekly, p. 24.
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