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.
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
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...
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)...
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 ....
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
She later recalled her isolation during...
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...
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
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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.