Simone de Beauvoir

Life&Times
By Lisa Appignanesi

Simone de Beauvoir (born 9 January 1908 in Paris, France; died 14 April 1986) was a member of the intellectual elite of philosopher-writers whose feminist ideas revolutionized 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.

‘Read side by side, their overlapping accounts are doublycompelling… Drake’s brisk life of Sartre tackles its subject’s enigmasand faiblesses head on… Lisa Appignanesi’s acute, empathetic Simone de Beauvoir, provides the dramatic conflict necessary to all great reads.’

Daily Mail, 24 June 2005

This lucid, short biography keeps faith with the “critical clarity” that lead its subject.’

The Independent, 19 August 2005

‘Simone de Beauvoir is the Intelligence Officer in the army that fought the Battle of the Sexes.  And Lisa Appignanesi is her best biographer’

Kathy Lette

Lisa Appignanesi, a writer, novelist and president of English PEN, is the author of our excellent biography of Simone de Beauvoir, published in 2005 by Haus in the Life & Times series. Appignanesi was 18 when she first dipped into the pages of The Second Sex and was mesmerized by Simone de Beauvoir’s lucid account of how one is not so much born, but rather becomes, a woman. ‘Her judicious presence and bold intelligence have been with me since’