Becoming Beauvoir : a life / Kate Kirkpatrick

Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction : Simone de Beauvoir : who's she? -- Growing like a girl -- The dutiful daughter -- Lover of God or lover of men? -- The love before the legend -- The valkyrie and the playboy -- Rooms of her own -- The trio that was a quartet -- War within, war without -- Forgotten philosophy -- Queen of existentialism -- American dilemmas -- The scandalous 'Second Sex' -- Putting a new face on love -- Feelig gypped -- Old age revealed -- The dying of the light -- Afterwords : What will become of Simone de Beauvoir?

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', wrote Simone de Beauvoir. This is a woman who was also to become a philosopher, a novelist, an existentialist, and a feminist icon. Her novels won prestigious literary prizes and The Second Sex transformed the way we think about sex and gender. She was also the long-term lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, but it was to film-maker Claude Lanzmann that she wrote 'You are my destiny, my eternity, my life' in letters which only came to light in 2018. Kate Kirkpatrick draws on previously unavailable diaries and letters, including those written to Lanzmann. The new personal details about her life revealed for the first time by the book can only deepen the mystery and our fascination with her. Why did this 'feminist icon' edit her image so much? Why did she lie about her relationship with Sartre so often, or claim not to be a philosopher? Perhaps with so much that's new here we'll get a little closer to understanding who Beauvoir really was.