Simone de Beauvoir

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was born on 9 January 1908 in Paris into a bourgeois Catholic family whose fortunes were declining. Her father, Georges de Beauvoir, was a lawyer with literary pretensions; her mother, Françoise, was devoutly Catholic. Beauvoir excelled academically, lost her faith at fourteen (a liberation she described as the defining event of her adolescence), and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, passing the agrégation in 1929 — the youngest person ever to do so. She met Jean-Paul Sartre during her studies; their relationship — open, non-cohabiting, intellectually symbiotic, and enduring until Sartre’s death in 1980 — became the most famous partnership in twentieth-century intellectual life.

Life and Career

Beauvoir taught philosophy at lycées in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris until the Second World War. Her first novel, She Came to Stay (L’Invitée, 1943), drew on her triangular relationship with Sartre and his student Olga Kosakiewicz — a novel about freedom, jealousy, and the philosophical problem of the Other. It established her as a novelist of ideas.

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949) changed the world. A 900-page work of philosophy, history, biology, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, it argued that women’s subordination was not natural but constructed — that femininity was a set of learned behaviours, social expectations, and institutional arrangements that could be changed. The book’s opening sentence of its second volume — “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” (“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”) — is the foundational statement of modern feminist theory. The Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books. It sold 22,000 copies in its first week in France.

The Mandarins (Les Mandarins, 1954) — a novel about Parisian intellectuals in the aftermath of the Liberation, navigating political commitment, personal relationships, and the Cold War — won the Prix Goncourt. Its characters are transparently based on Sartre, Camus, Nelson Algren (with whom Beauvoir had a passionate affair in Chicago), and other figures in the Parisian intellectual world.

Her memoirs — Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972) — are among the most important autobiographical works of the century, providing an intimate account of French intellectual life and the development of existentialist and feminist thought. A Very Easy Death (1964), about her mother’s death from cancer, is a masterpiece of the form — short, devastating, and unflinching.

The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse, 1970) applied the same analytical framework she had used on gender to the experience of aging — arguing that society’s treatment of the elderly was as systematically dehumanising as its treatment of women.

Beauvoir died on 14 April 1986, six years after Sartre. She is buried beside him at the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Major Works and Themes

Beauvoir’s work is unified by a single philosophical commitment: the existentialist conviction that human beings are free — that they create themselves through their choices — and that the structures (patriarchy, bourgeois morality, economic inequality) that deny this freedom are forms of bad faith. Her fiction, philosophy, and memoir are all investigations of how individuals navigate the tension between freedom and constraint, authenticity and convention, self and other.

The Second Sex is her permanent achievement. Its argument — that gender is constructed, not given — has become so thoroughly absorbed into contemporary thought that it is easy to forget how radical it was. The book provided the intellectual foundation for the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and remains the starting point for any serious discussion of gender.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Beauvoir’s reputation has undergone significant revision. During her lifetime and for some years after, she was often treated as Sartre’s intellectual companion rather than as an independent thinker — an irony that her own work had the tools to diagnose. Feminist scholars since the 1990s have demonstrated the originality of her philosophical contributions, arguing that The Second Sex anticipated developments in phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism that are often attributed to later thinkers.

She is now recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century and the most influential feminist thinker in history. Her novels and memoirs are widely read and taught. Her influence extends far beyond philosophy: Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Judith Butler, and virtually every subsequent feminist theorist has built on foundations she laid.

Key Works

• She Came to Stay (1943)
• The Second Sex (1949)
• The Mandarins (1954) — Prix Goncourt
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
• A Very Easy Death (1964)
• The Coming of Age (1970)

Collecting Beauvoir

French first editions are the primary collecting target. Le Deuxième Sexe (1949, Gallimard, two volumes) is the key title. Fine copies of both volumes bring $1,000–$4,000. Les Mandarins (1954, Gallimard) — the Prix Goncourt winner — brings $300–$800.

English translations are also collected: The Second Sex (1953, Knopf, translated by H.M. Parshley) in the original dust jacket brings $300–$800. The Parshley translation has been superseded by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s 2009 translation, but the original English edition remains the collector’s item.

Signed copies exist — Beauvoir was a public intellectual who appeared at events and signed books — but they are uncommon in the Anglophone market. Autograph letters, particularly those to Nelson Algren (sold at various auction houses), are highly prized.