Simone de Beauvoir

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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 ascending Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mavis Gallant
The essays comprising part one cover such topics as the 1968 student protests in Paris, the writer Marguerite Yourcenar , and the case of Gabrielle Russier , while the reviews of part two take...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Julia Kristeva
The first of these books addresses Freud 's concept of revolt against the fathers as the basis of individual maturation and independence, and seeks by looking at the lives of three distinguished modern social rebels...
Textual Production Hannah Arendt
It was ten years since she had sketched out parts of this book, as what she then called a kind of second volume of The Human Condition.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Yale University Press.
420
Its own third volume, Judging...
Textual Production Winsome Pinnock
This was the first play that WP wrote, aged twenty-three. Though it is largely a play about women, it grew from interviews she did with veterans from the Falklands War, when she felt that the...
Textual Production Ketaki Kushari Dyson
For this column she reviewed authors such as Sylvia Plath , D. H. Lawrence , Thom Gunn , Ted Hughes , Cesare Pavese , Eugene Ionesco , Simone de Beauvoir , Jorge Luis Borges ,...
Textual Production Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Features Adrienne Rich
These poems abandon AR 's former regular metres for free verse, as they abandon decorum for outspoken personal expression about the struggle necessary to be a thinking woman rather than a good girl.
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
Reception Anne Conway
Two of AC 's most recent editors, Coudert and Corse , more forcefully assert that hers is the most interesting and original philosophical treatise written by a woman in the seventeenth century
Conway, Anne. “Introduction”. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, edited by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse, Cambridge University Press, p. vii - xxxiii.
xxix
and that...
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...
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 ....
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.
34
For herself and Edith Sitwell (debs at...
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
The collection followed on intensive reading of such...

Timeline

1673: François Poulain (or Poullain) de la Barre...

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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...

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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...

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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...

Writing climate item

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...

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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,...

Writing climate item

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...

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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.
24

Texts

Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done. Translator O’Brian, Patrick, André Deutsch; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Le deuxième sexe. Gallimard, 1949.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Le sang des autres. Gallimard, 1945.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Les mandarins. Gallimard, 1954.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. Gallimard, 1958.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translator Kirkup, James, Penguin, 2001.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translator Parshley, H. M., Jonathan Cape, 1953.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Tout compte fait. Gallimard, 1972.
Beauvoir, Simone de. “Translator’s Preface”. The Second Sex, translated by. H. M. Parshley, Jonathan Cape, 1953, pp. 7-11.