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.
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ,...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...

Timeline

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

Writing climate item

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...

Building item

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...

Building item

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...

Building item

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...

Building item

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.