Simone de Beauvoir

by Lisa Appignanesi

Overview

Simone de Beauvoir was a member of the intellectual elite of philosopher-writers whose feminist ideas revolutionised conventional thinking. She is known primarily for her monumental work: The Second Sex, (1949) a scholarly and passionate seminal work, which became a classic of feminist literature but also for her partnership with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, France's most celebrated and unconventional intellectual couplings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912208869
Publisher:	Haus Publishing
Publication date:	09/01/2008
Series:	Life & Times
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	182
File size:	257 KB

About the Author

Lisa Appignanesi, a writer, novelist and former president of English PEN.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Dutiful Daughter

A Necessary Love

Literature as Salvation

The Ethics of Existentialism

Being a Woman

The Committed Intellectual

The Exemplary Life

A Radical Old Age

Notes

Chronology

List of Works

Further Readting

Picture Sources

Index

Editorial Reviews

"‘What a lot Lisa Appignanesi has packed into such a slim volume. This is the ideal introduction to Simone de Beauvoir, capturing the woman, the philosopher, the lover, the public intellectual, and the fluidity between these roles. Appignanesi is brilliantly nuanced on the emotional costs of de Beauvoir’s complicated ‘pact’ with Sartre and on the way the philosophy emerged, hard-won, out of the life. It’s a book that’s attentive to de Beauvoir’s times and alive to her urgent relevance to ours."

— Dr Lara Feigel, author of Free Woman

"This is an eloquent, clear-eyed, and readable portrait of an immensely complex and brilliant woman, and her ambivalence about being perceived as one. In this general but deeply researched biography, Lisa Appignanesi moves from the young philosophy student through her love affairs with Sartre, Algren, and Lanzmann through to her radicalized later years, contextualizing these events within de Beauvoir’s work, avoiding facile biographical readings of it. On the contrary: the life and work come together here in mutually-reinforcing urgency. De Beauvoir is as relevant now as seventy years ago and this is an excellent overview of why."

— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

From the Publisher