Simone de Beauvoir’s second coming

For decades Simone de Beauvoir was seen as a mere accessory to Sartre. But we are only beginning to understand her contribution to today’s politics.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The New Statesman

(FRANCE. Paris. 1949. The French writer Simone de BEAUVOIR, author of "The Second Sex", at home)

‘The opening pages of the titular novella of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1967 trilogy, The Woman Destroyed, start promisingly enough. A woman gazes in wonder at an autumn landscape. She is travelling alone, having kissed her husband goodbye at the airport. Her children have left home. She is free. “For the surprising thing about it is my being here, and the cheerfulness of my being here,” she writes in her diary, with an enthusiasm she has not felt since her twenties. Pretty soon, it all goes wrong. The husband is having an affair. No longer able to see herself through his eyes, no more wife, lover, mother, she unravels. She – or one version of herself – is destroyed…’

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