With the foundational feminist thinker as she accepts "the great adventure of being me" "That's when everything started," Simone de Beauvoir wrote in an entry dated July 8, 1929. On that day, her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre began. This second volume of Beauvoir's Diary of a Philosophy Student takes readers into smoky dorm rooms and inter-war Paris as it continues the feminist philosopher's coming-of-age story. Here are Beauvoir's famous sparring sessions with Sartre in the Luxembourg Gardens teasing him while stoking her burgeoning intellectual strength. Here also are her friendships and academic challenges, the discovery of important future influences like Barres and Hegel, and her early forays into formulating the problem of the Other.
In addition to the diary, the editors provide invaluable supplementary material. A trove of footnotes and endnotes elaborates on virtually every reference made by Beauvoir, offering an atlas of her knowledge and education while at the same time allowing readers to share her intellectual and cultural milieu. Translator and scholar Barbara Klaw also contributes an introduction on reading Beauvoir's diaries as a philosophy of self-help.
About the Authors
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was a French existentialist philosopher. Her works include Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949).
Barbara Klaw is a professor emerita of French at Northern Kentucky University. She is the translator of Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27, and author of Le Paris de Beauvoir.
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, adopted daughter and literary executor of Simone de Beauvoir, is the editor of Lettres a Sartre and other works by Beauvoir.
Margaret A. Simons is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the author of Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Klaw, Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Simons coedited Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27
Industry Reviews
"Both volumes are strong and important contributions to feminist philosophy, not only in their themes but in significantly addressing these themes with reference to gendered human existence. I recommend them to anyone who is interested in understanding the making of a feminist philosopher, especially to early researchers working on Beauvoir, to undergraduates trying to understand philosophy, as well as to scholars seeking to understand Beauvoir and her philosophical themes." --Hypatia
"Klaw's extensive notes are invaluable, not only in providing biographical background for Beauvoir's literary and philosophical references, but also for flatting difficulties in translation." --Choice
?"A fascinating text! Barbara Klaw's translation is consistently accurate as well as highly readable and the entire volume is essential for understanding how Beauvoir became Beauvoir."--Gerald J. Prince, author of A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction
"This is a truly remarkable book, and a significant contribution to Beauvoir scholarship. Barbara Klaw's excellent translation provides unique access to the formative years of one of the twentieth century's great philosophers, authors, and public intellectuals. Beauvoir's portrayals and reflections on her first meetings and conversations with Sartre, on family, love, friendship and everyday life in Paris-as well as her thoughts on the philosophical and literary texts that she studied-are all included in this fascinating book. This is mandatory reading for all striving to obtain an understanding of Beauvoir, her life, and her work."--Tove Pettersen, President of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society
?"This diary increases our admiration for Beauvoir's heroic determination to make something of herself. A precious document."--Bookforum
?"This is a groundbreaking and extremely important work for feminists, philosophers, and scholars of autobiography, and a welcome academic corrective to the edited, abridged, and simplified commercial representations of this important and complex twentieth-century French feminist, philosopher, and writer."--Kentucky Philological Review
?"Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret Simons, and Marybeth Timmerman have given the world a remarkable gift. This volume is organized, annotated, and contextualized superbly. How much richer and more profound [Beauvoir's] corpus becomes with the addition of these priceless writings. The publication of her diaries will only further elevate her philosophical and literal legacy."--H-France Review
?"This indispensable volume offers a panorama of Beauvoir's intellectual preoccupations. The translators and editors are to be applauded for producing such a valuable contribution to Beauvoir studies."--French Studies
"An admirable example of careful translating and editing. The diary presents an opportunity for opening an avenue of Beauvorian scholarship in aesthetics."--APA Newsletter
"This is a magnificent piece of work. It is an engaging read and lets English readers to whom French is not accessible have first-hand access to some now much-discussed evidence regarding the independence of Beauvoir's thought. The translation is beautiful, smooth, and true. A real coup!"--Claudia Card, author of The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir
"This book is an enormously significant event which scholars have been eagerly awaiting for quite some time. Study of Beauvoir's diaries not only alerts us to fascinating and unknown influences on her intellectual and personal development, but it could also form the basis for an amazing study of how the raw material of adolescent emotion, all its masochism and its narcissism, became transmuted into the readable and beautiful texts from which we can all learn so much."--Meryl Altman, DePauw University
