Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), a French writer, first articulated what has since become the basis of the modern feminist movement. She was the author of novels, autobiographies, and non-fiction analysis dealing with women's position in a male-dominated world.

Simone de Beauvoir set out to live her life as an example to her contemporaries and chronicled that life for those who followed. Fiercely independent, an ardent feminist before there was such a movement, her life was her legacy and her work was to memorialize that life.

"I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white-enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail." Thus begins the first of four memoirs written by de Beauvoir. It is through these autobiographies that de Beauvoir's readers best know her, and it is in her book The Second Sex, an early feminist manifesto, that de Beauvoir synthesized that life into the context of the historical condition of women.

The first child of a vaguely noble couple, de Beauvoir was a willful girl, prone to temper tantrums. Her sister, Poupette, was born when de Beauvoir was two and a half, and the two had a warm relationship. After World War I her father never fully recovered his financial security and the family moved to a more modest home; the daughters were told they had lost their dowries. Forced to choose a profession, de Beauvoir entered the Sorbonne and began to take courses in philosophy to become a teacher. She also began keeping a journal - which became a lifetime habit - and writing some stories.

Link with Sartre

When de Beauvoir was 21 she joined a group of philosophy students including Jean-Paul Sartre. Her relationship with Sartre - intellectually, emotionally, and romantically - was to continue throughout most of their lives. Sartre, the father of existentialism - a school of thought that holds man is on his own, "condemned to be free," as Sartre says in Being and Nothingness - was the single most important influence on de Beauvoir's life.

In 1929 Sartre suggested that, rather than be married, the two sign a conjugal pact which could be renewed or cancelled after two years. When the pact came due, Sartre was offered a job teaching philosophy in Le Havre and de Beauvoir was offered a similar job in Marseilles. He suggested they get married, but they both rejected the idea for fear of forcing their free relationship into the confines of an outer-defined bond. It is indeed ironic that de Beauvoir, whose independence marked her life at every juncture, was perhaps best known as Sartre's lover.

The first installment of de Beauvoir's autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, is the story of the author's rejection of the bourgeois values of her parents' lives. The second volume, The Prime of Life, covers the years 1929 through 1944. Written in the postwar years, she separated the events taking place in Europe that led to the war from her own, isolated life. By 1939, however, the two strands were inseparable. Both de Beauvoir and Sartre were teaching in Paris when the war broke out. Earlier she had written two novels that she never submitted for publication and one collection of short stories that was rejected for publication. She was, she said, too happy to write.

That happiness ended in the 1940s with the outbreak of World War II and the interruption of her relationship with Sartre. The introduction of another woman into Sartre's life, and then the anxiety and loneliness de Beauvoir felt while Sartre was a prisoner for more than a year led to her first significant novel, She Came to Stay, published in 1943. She Came to Stay is a study of the effects of love and jealousy. In the next four years she published The Blood of Others, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, Les Bouches Inutiles, and All Men are Mortal.

America Day By Day a chronicle of de Beauvoir's 1947 trip to the United States, and the third installment of her autobiography, Force of Circumstances, cover the period during which the author was formulating and writing The Second Sex, her feminist tract.

The Second Sex

Written in 1949, The Second Sex is blunt and inelegant like her other writing. Its power comes from its content. Her themes and method of attack in The Second Sex are also the reoccurring issues of her work. The book rests on two theses: that man, who views himself as the essential being, has made woman into the inessential being, "the Other," and that femininity as a trait is an artificial posture. Both theses derive from Sartre's existentialism.

The Second Sex was perhaps the most important treatise on women's rights through the 1980s. When it first appeared, however, the reception was less than overwhelming. The lesson of her own life - that womanhood is not a condition one is born to but rather a posture one takes on - was fully realized here. De Beauvoir's personal frustrations were placed in terms of the general, dependent condition of women. Historical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical, The Second Sex does not offer any concrete solutions except "that men and women rise above their natural differentiation and unequivocally affirm their brotherhood."

If The Second Sex bemoans the female condition, de Beauvoir's portrayal of her own life revealed the possibilities available to the woman who can escape enslavement. Hers was a life of equality, yet de Beauvoir remained a voice and a model for those women whose lives were not liberated.

The fourth installment of her autobiography, All Said And Done, was written when de Beauvoir was 63. It portrays a person who has always been secure in an imperfect world. She writes: "Since I was 21, I have never been lonely. The opportunities granted to me at the beginning helped me not only to lead a happy life but to be happy in the life I led. I have been aware of my shortcomings and my limits, but I have made the best of them. When I was tormented by what was happening in the world, it was the world I wanted to change, not my place in it."

De Beauvoir died of a circulatory ailment in a Parisian hospital April 14, 1986. Sartre had died six years earlier.

Further Reading

The most complete biographies of Simone de Beauvoir are her four autobiographies, Memoires of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstances (1963), and All Said And Done (1972). Carol Ascher wrote an almost reverential analysis of the author's work, Simone de Beauvoir - A Life of Freedom (1981), which illustrates her effect on feminist thought. Simone de Beauvoir by Konrad Bieber (1979) and Simone de Beauvoir by Robert Cottrell (1975) both offer more critical analysis.

(1908-86) Philosopher, associated with the existentialist movement, who wrote on a wide range of issues, including radical politics, feminism, and ageism. Born in Paris, de Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, whilst studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, and the two shared a tumultuous relationship. In her writings she combined a political concern with autobiographical insight and an existentialist striving against the limitations imposed by society. The Second Sex (1949) sought to assert a positive feminine identity, as opposed to one defined by and in the interests of the dominant male. She traced the marginalization of women through a history of masculine-dominated cultural and social development, and outlined the contemporary position of women within society. She criticized marriage and motherhood as constraints on the freedom of women, and saw socialist economic restructuring as a key to enhancing the status of women. De Beauvoir became actively involved in the women's movement in the early 1970s, campaigning on a variety of feminist issues, particularly the legalization of abortion and the provision of contraception. In The Coming of Age (1970) she presented an analysis of the treatment of the elderly across various cultures and throughout history. Again, de Beauvoir showed how patterns of discrimination were built into social norms and practices.

— Alistair McMillan

Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-86). French writer, philosopher, autobiographer, feminist, and political activist. Simone de Beauvoir is likely to be considered one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th c.; she has been hailed as the mother of post-1968 feminism, but her actual production was much wider than this title suggests.

Born in Montparnasse into a conservative bourgeois milieu, she received the narrow secondary education thought appropriate for a ‘jeune fille rangée’. Fortunately, a deterioration in the family fortunes led her parents to allow her to train for a teaching career, first at the Institut Catholique and the Institut Sainte-Marie, and then at the Sorbonne. Preparing here for the agrégation in philosophy, Beauvoir encountered Jean-Paul Sartre, who remained a capital figure in the rest of her existence. The couple they formed, in which each regarded the other as an ‘essential’ love whilst remaining free to experience other ‘contingent’ loves, has provoked a great deal of curiosity. They refused the idea of marriage and children, and never set up home together, preferring throughout the 1930s and 1940s to live separately in cheap hotels. Beauvoir always considered Sartre as the philosopher of the two, and in her early essays took Sartre's L' Être et le néant (1943) as her chief reference point. In Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and Pour une morale de l'ambigüité (1947) she explores Sartre's existentialism for its moral potential and develops the ways in which relationships between people could go beyond the conflictual.

Her real ambition, however, was to write fiction, and after a number of early attempts and the refusal of her volume of short stories Quand prime le spirituel (published only in 1979), her first novel, L'Invitée, appeared in 1943. Both an illustration of the Hegelian dictum: ‘Chaque conscience poursuit la mort de l'autre’, and a fictionalized account of the trio which she and Sartre formed with an ex-pupil, Olga Kosakievicz, the text plays out a highly charged set of psycho-sexual conflicts.

L'Invitée pays only scant attention to historical and social pressures, but the events of the late 1930s revolutionized Beauvoir's attitudes: ‘l'histoire m'a saisie pour ne plus me lâcher’, she later wrote of this period in La Force de l'âge. Her second novel, Le Sang des autres (1945), though still highly existentialist in its vocabulary and preoccupations, focuses on the moral dilemmas of a Resistance leader and argues a case close to the position of the French Communist Party at that time. Before the war Beauvoir had supported herself by teaching philosophy, first at a lycée in Marseille, then in Rouen and, from 1936, in Paris. After the war she devoted herself to writing, producing a third novel entitled Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946), which explores the potential of individual action for historical significance, and her only play, Les Bouches inutiles (1944).

In 1947 she spent five months in the United States on a lecture tour. On her return she published her impressions in L'Amérique au jour le jour (1948), an account which voices her criticisms of America but omits the fact that she had fallen in love. Her liaison with the American writer Nelson Algren, which lasted until 1951, created a major crisis in her life and provided some of the material for Les Mandarins (1954), the novel for which she was awarded the Prix Goncourt (making her the third woman ever to receive it). From 1946 onwards, however, she had been working on Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), a book which began as a short essay and which developed into two volumes of detailed analysis of women's oppression. Beauvoir herself was astonished by the situation which she uncovered; the book scandalized many of its French readers, and it was not until the early 1970s that Beauvoir was to find herself acclaimed as a feminist heroine.

Although a Communist sympathizer during the 1940s, she had not been a political activist. In the early 1950s she moved much closer to Marxism, partly as a result of her debates with Claude Lanzmann, who was 17 years younger than herself and shared with her for several years the flat behind the Montparnasse cemetery which she bought with the proceeds of the Goncourt Prize. During the 1950s she visited China and the Soviet Union with Sartre, and published La Longue Marche (1957) an enthusiastic essay on Communist China. She rejoiced at the defeat of the French in Vietnam and involved herself heavily in the campaign against French atrocities in the Algerian War. In 1963 she wrote in La Force des choses that ‘la guerre d'Algérie a porté au rouge l'horreur que m'inspire ma classe’.

She produced the first volume of her autobiography, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée in 1958; this was later followed by La Force de l'âge (1960), La Force des choses (1963), and Tout compte fait (1972). In 1964 she published Une mort très douce, an account of her mother's death. Twelve years after Les Mandarins she returned to fiction with Les Belles Images (1966), a sophisticated deconstruction of the language in which the bourgeoisie justifies its own existence, and La Femme rompue (1968), three short stories examining the ways in which women weave themselves into their own self-destruction. La Vieillesse (1970) analyses the problems of old age and denounces the conditions of the elderly in Western society.

May 1968 found Beauvoir siding with the Maoist students and selling banned revolutionary papers on the streets. In the aftermath of 1968 the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes contacted her, and she began campaigning on abortion and other feminist issues. A strong influence on Anglo-American feminism, she had no sympathy with the new French feminism of sexual difference. She always remained implacably opposed to the family structure, which she considered basic to women's oppression. After Sartre's death she published La Cérémonie des Adieux suivie d'Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre (1981); the publication of their correspondence and (posthumously) of Beauvoir's war diaries proved highly controversial, demonstrating that even a feminist heroine may have feet of clay. She died on 14 April 1986 and was buried with Sartre in the Montparnasse cemetery opposite her home.

[Elizabeth Fallaize]

Bibliography

• E. Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (1988)
• D. Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (1990)
• T. Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994)

Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-86) French feminist philosopher and novelist. Born in Paris, de Beauvoir studied at the Sorbonne, and became famous when she wrote the classic study of women's oppression Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, trs. as The Second Sex, 1953). This is the first influential work of feminist philosophy to distinguish between biological sexual difference and the socially imposed categories of gender. Before that her concern was to develop a non-solipsistic, social existentialism, in which an individual's freedom is only achieved in communication with others equally free. De Beauvoir's long association with Sartre is not usually regarded as an example of this equality. It culminated in Les Cérémonies des adieux (1981, trs. as Adieux: a Farewell to Sartre, 1984), an account of the last years of Sartre's life published a year after his death. Autobiographical writings include Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958, trs. as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1959) and Une morte très douce (1964, trs. as A Very Easy Death, 1964).

Quotes:

"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time."

"Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly."

"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object."

"The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."

"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."

"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius."

See more famous quotes by Simone De Beauvoir

• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '70s-'90s
• Major Genres: History, Drama
• Career Highlights: All Men Are Mortal, The Blood of Others, La Donna Spezzata
• First Major Screen Credit: The Blood of Others (1984)

Biography

Simone de Beauvoir

Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Simone de Beauvoir
Full name	Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Born	January 9, 1908(1908-01-09) Paris, France
Died	April 14, 1986 (aged 78) Paris, France
School/tradition	Existentialism Feminism
Main interests	Politics, Feminism, Ethics
Notable ideas	ethics of ambiguity, feminist ethics, existential feminism
Influenced by Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Sade
Influenced Butler, Camus, Sartre, Paglia, Friedan, Hoagland, Rich, Greer

"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation).

Simone de Beauvoir (French pronunciation: [simɔn də boˈvwaʀ]) (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a French writer, existentialist philosopher, feminist, and social theorist. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography in several volumes. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. She is also noted for her lifelong polyamorous relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Middle years 2.1 She Came to Stay and The Mandarins 2.2 Existentialist ethics 2.3 Sexuality, existentialist feminism, and The Second Sex 2.4 Les Temps Modernes 3 Later years 4 Death, honors and legacy 5 Bibliography 5.1 Translations 6 References 6.1 Sources 6.1.1 Bibliographic sources 7 External links

Early years

Simone de Beauvoir was the daughter of Georges de Beauvoir, a one-time lawyer and amateur actor, and Françoise Brasseur, a young woman from Verdun. She was born in Paris as 'Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir' and was educated at a Catholic school for girls, something that was looked down on by the intellectuals at the time. The Catholic schools for girls were seen as places where the young were taught how to be mothers and wives more than a place to learn. After World War I, Simone's maternal grandfather Gustave Brasseur, president of the Meuse Bank, went bankrupt, throwing his entire family into dishonor and poverty. The family had to move into a smaller apartment and Georges de Beauvoir had to go back to work; his relationship with his wife suffered.

Simone was always aware that her father had hoped to have a son, instead of two daughters (her younger sister Hélène de Beauvoir became a painter). However, he did tell Simone, "You have the brain of a man," and from a young age Simone was a distinguished student. Georges de Beauvoir passed his love of theater and literature to his daughter. He became convinced that only scholarly success could lift his daughters out of poverty.

At 15, Simone de Beauvoir had already decided she would be a writer. She did well in many subjects, but was especially attracted to philosophy, which she went on to study at the University of Paris. There she met many other young intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre.

De Beauvoir, whose private life came to be admired nearly as much as her work, chose to never marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre with whom she had a lifelong relationship.^[1] She did not ever bear a child.^[1] This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes and to travel, write, teach, and to have lovers.^[1]

Middle years

After passing the baccalaureate exams in mathematics and philosophy, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, then philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1929, while at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir gave a presentation on Leibniz. Soon after she became involved in what was to become a lifelong relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir studied at the École Normale along with Sartre.

In 1929, at the age of 21, Beauvoir became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy, and the 9th woman to obtain this degree. On the final examination she received second place; Sartre, age 24, was first (he'd failed his first exam). According to Deirdre Bair's 1990 biography of Beauvoir, the jury for the agrégation argued over whether to give Sartre or Beauvoir first place in the competition. In the end they awarded it to Sartre. ^[2]

While at the Sorbonne, Beauvoir acquired her lifelong nickname, Castor, the French word for "beaver" given to her because of the animal's strong work ethic and the resemblance of her surname to the English word "beaver".

She Came to Stay and The Mandarins

In 1943, Beauvoir published She Came to Stay, a fictionalized chronicle of her and Sartre's relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Olga was one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where Beauvoir taught during the early 30s. She grew fond of Olga. Sartre tried to pursue Olga but she denied him; he began a relationship with her sister Wanda instead. Sartre supported Olga for years until she met and married her husband, Beauvoir's lover Jacques-Laurent Bost. At Sartre's death, he was still supporting Wanda. In the novel, set just before the outbreak of World War II, Beauvoir makes one character from the complex relationships of Olga and Wanda. The fictionalized versions of Beauvoir and Sartre have a ménage à trois with the young woman. The novel also delves into Beauvoir and Sartre's complex relationship and how it was affected by the ménage à trois.

Beauvoir's metaphysical novel She Came to Stay was followed by many others, including The Blood of Others which explores the nature of individual responsibility, and The Mandarins, which won her the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary prize. The Mandarins is set just after the end of World War II. The Mandarins depicted Sartre, Nelson Algren, and many philosophers and friends among Sartre and Beauvoir's intimate circle.

Existentialist ethics

In 1944 Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics, which inspired her to write more on the subject. This book, Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the abstruse character of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The ambiguity about which Beauvoir writes clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness.

Sexuality, existentialist feminism, and The Second Sex

The Second Sex cover

Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) was originally published as a two-volume book in France in 1949. These works were very quickly published in America as The Second Sex, due to the quick translation by Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Because Parshley had only a basic familiarity with the French language, and a minimal understanding of philosophy (he was a professor of biology at Smith College), much of Beauvoir's book was mistranslated or inappropriately cut, distorting her intended message.^[3] Nevertheless, to this day, Knopf has prevented the introduction of a more accurate retranslation of Beauvoir's work, having declined all proposals despite the efforts of existentialist scholars.^[3]

In her own way, Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of Erica Jong and Germaine Greer. Algren, no example of restraint, was outraged by the frank way Beauvoir later described her American sexual experiences in The Mandarins (dedicated to Algren, on whom the character Lewis Brogan was based) and in her autobiographies. He vented his outrage when reviewing American translations of her work. Much material bearing on this episode in Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death.

In the chapter "Woman: Myth and Reality" of The Second Sex, Beauvoir argued that men had made women the "Other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that this also happened on the basis of other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.

The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. The capitalized 'O' in "other" indicates the wholly other.

Beauvoir argued that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She said that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir said that this attitude limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.

Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.

A critical essay, "Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe", was written by Suzanne Lilar in 1969.

Les Temps Modernes

At the end of World War II, Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes, a political journal Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books. Beauvoir remained an editor until her death.

Later years

Beauvoir, Sartre and Che Guevara in Cuba , 1960

Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about her travels in the United States and China, and published essays and fiction rigorously, especially throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging.

In 1979 she published When Things of the Spirit Come First, a set of short stories centered around and based upon women important to her earlier years. The stories were written well before the novel She Came to Stay, but Beauvoir did not think they were worthy of publication until about forty years later.

Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a longstanding feud, which led Merleau-Ponty to leave Les Temps Modernes. Beauvoir sided with Sartre and ceased to associate with Merleau-Ponty. In Beauvoir's later years, she hosted the journal's editorial meetings in her flat and contributed more than Sartre, whom she often had to force to offer his opinions.

Beauvoir also notably wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: After the War and Hard Times); and All Said and Done.

In the 1970s Beauvoir became active in France's women's liberation movement. She signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a list of famous women who claimed, mostly falsely, to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. Beauvoir had not actually had an abortion.^{[citation needed]} Signatories were diverse as Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, and Beauvoir's sister Poupette. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France.

Her 1970 long essay La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age) is a rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about age 60. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years. In the opening of Adieux, Beauvoir notes that it is the only major published work of hers which Sartre did not read before its publication. She and Sartre always read one another's work.

After Sartre died, Beauvoir published his letters to her with edits to spare the feelings of people in their circle who were still living. After Beauvoir's death, Sartre's adopted daughter and literary heir Arlette Elkaïm would not let many of Sartre's letters be published in unedited form. Most of Sartre's letters available today have Beauvoir's edits, which include a few omissions but mostly the use of pseudonyms. Beauvoir's adopted daughter and literary heir Sylvie Le Bon, unlike Elkaïm, published Beauvoir's unedited letters to both Sartre and Algren.

Death, honors and legacy

Beauvoir's grave at the Cimetière du Montparnasse

The Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir in Paris

Beauvoir died of pneumonia in Paris, aged 78. She is buried next to Sartre at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Since her death, her reputation has grown. Especially in academia, she is considered the mother of post-1968 feminism. There has also been a growing awareness of her as a major French thinker and existentialist philosopher.

Contemporary discussion analyzes the influences of Beauvoir and Sartre on one another. She is seen as having influenced Sartre's masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, while also having written much on philosophy that is independent of Sartrean existentialism. Some scholars have explored the influences of her earlier philosophical essays and treatises upon Sartre's later thought. She is studied by many respected academics both within and outside philosophy circles, including Margaret A. Simons and Sally Scholtz. Beauvoir's life has also inspired numerous biographies.

In 2006, the city of Paris commissioned architect Dietmar Feichtinger to design a sophisticated footbridge across the Seine River. The bridge was named the Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir in her honor. It leads to the new Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Bibliography

• She Came to Stay, (1943)
• Pyrrhus et Cinéas, (1944)
• The Blood of Others, (1945)
• Who Shall Die?, (1945)
• All Men are Mortal, (1946)
• The Ethics of Ambiguity, (1947)
• The Second Sex, (1949)
• America Day by Day, (1954)
• The Mandarins, (1954)
• Must We Burn Sade?, (1955)
• The Long March, (1957)
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, (1958)
• The Prime of Life, (1960)
• Force of Circumstance, (1963)
• A Very Easy Death, (1964)
• Les Belles Images, (1966)
• The Woman Destroyed, (1967)
• The Coming of Age, (1970)
• All Said and Done, (1972)
• When Things of the Spirit Come First, (1979)
• Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, (1981)
• Letters to Sartre, (1990)
• A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, (1998)

Translations

• Patrick O'Brian was Beauvoir's principal English translator, until he attained commercial success as a novelist.

• Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margaret A. Simons et al.) contains a selection of essays by Beauvoir translated for the first time into English. Among those are: Pyrrhus and Cineas, discussing the futility or utility of action, two previously unpublished chapters from her novel She Came to Stay and an introduction to Ethics of Ambiguity.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Schneir, Miriam (1994). Feminism in Our Time. Vintage Books. p. 5. ISBN 0-679-74508-4. 
2. ^ Louis Menand, "Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir", page 4. (The New Yorker, December 26, 2005).
3. ^ ^{a b} Moi, Toril 'While We Wait: The English Translation of "The Second Sex" in Signs 27(4) (summer, 2002), pp., 1005-1035.

Sources

• Bair, Deirdre, 1990. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books, ISBN 0-671-60681-6
• Rowley, Hazel, 2005. Tête-a-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: HarperCollins.
• Suzanne Lilar, 1969. Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe (with collaboration of Prof. Dreyfus). Paris, University Presses of France (Presses Universitaires de France).
• Fraser, M., 1999. Identity Without Selfhood: Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977.
• Hélène Rouch, 2001-2002, Trois conceptions du sexe: Simone de Beauvoir entre Adrienne Sahuqué et Suzanne Lilar, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, n° 18, pp. 49–60.
• Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute, 2002. Conférence Élisabeth Badinter, Jacques Lassalle & Lucette Finas, ISBN 2717722203.

Bibliographic sources

• Beauvoir, Simone de. Woman: Myth & Reality,
  • in Jacobus, Lee A (ed.) A World of Ideas. Bedford/St. Martins, Boston 2006. 780-795
  • in Prince, Althea, and Susan Silva Wayne. Feminisms and Womanisms: A Women's Studies Reader. Women's Press, Toronto 2004 p. 59-65.

External links

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• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir by Shannon Mussett. Includes a bibliography of her work in English translation.
• "Simone de Beauvoir" article by Debra Bergoffen in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Website de Claudine Monteil, writer and women’s rights specialist who built a long friendship with Simone de Beauvoir.
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• An article by Finnish local library of Kuusankoski.
• Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir, by Louis Menand. The New Yorker.
• The Second Sex: Significant Other.
• The Journal of French Philosophy - the online home of the Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française
• Digital resources on The Second Sex
• Beauvoir before Beauvoir - An article by Philippe Sollers (fr.)

• English Translation online- The Ethics of Ambiguity.
• Murray, Jenni (22 January 2008). "Simone de Beauvoir". Woman's Hour. BBC Radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2008_04_tue.shtml. 

v • d • e Austrian State Prize for European Literature winning authors Zbigniew Herbert (1965) · W. H. Auden (1966) · Vasko Popa (1967) · Václav Havel (1968) · nobody (1969) · Eugène Ionesco (1970) · Sławomir Mrożek (1971) · Peter Huchel (1972) · Harold Pinter (1973) · Sándor Weöres (1974) · Pavel Kohout (1975) · Italo Calvino (1976) · Fulvio Tomizza (1977) · Simone de Beauvoir (1978) · nobody (1979) · Sarah Kirsch (1980) · Doris Lessing (1981) · Tadeusz Różewicz (1982) · Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1983) · Christa Wolf (1984) · nobody (1985) · Stanisław Lem (1986) · Milan Kundera (1987) · Andrzej Szczypiorski (1988) · Marguerite Duras (1989) · Helmut Heißenbüttel (1990) · Péter Nádas (1991) · Salman Rushdie (1992) · Chinghiz Aitmatov (1993) · Inger Christensen (1994) · Ilse Aichinger (1995) · Aleksandar Tišma (1996) · Jürg Laederach (1997) · Antonio Tabucchi (1998) · Dubravka Ugrešić (1999) · António Lobo Antunes (2000) · Umberto Eco (2001) · Christoph Hein (2002) · Cees Nooteboom (2003) · Julian Barnes (2004) · Claudio Magris (2005) · Jorge Semprún (2006) · A. L. Kennedy (2007) · Agota Kristof (2008)

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