Simone De Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman - Softcover

Moi, Toril

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199238723 ISBN 13: 9780199238729

Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2008

Synopsis

In Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Toril Moi shows how Simone de Beauvoir became the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, this book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex, and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life. Ranging from an investigation of French educational institutions to reflections on the relationship between freedom and flirtation, this book uncovers the conflicts and difficulties of an intellectual woman in the middle of the twentieth century. Through her analysis of Beauvoir's life and work Moi shows how difficult it was - and still is - for women to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Two major chapters on The Second Sex provide a theoretical and a political analysis of that epochal text. The last chapter turns to Beauvoir's love life, her depressions and her fear of ageing. In a major new introduction, Moi discusses Beauvoir's letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, as well as her recently published student diaries from 1926/27.

About this title

Review

Review from previous edition This book makes us discover a Beauvoir analysed with sympathy but without complaisance. A worthy Beauvoir emerges: not the super-woman one so often hears about, but a complex, suffering woman who finds it hard to be different except in her jealousy and sorrow. But, what strength and what courage! She opened the way, and this book does her justice. (Julia Kristeva)

Sympathetic and critical, Moi's impassioned study never loses sight of the difficulty of Beauvoir's intellectual and personal journey through her life, it will send its readers back to Beauvoir's writings with a new sense of political necessity and possibility for women. (Professor Jacqueline Rose, University of London)

a landmark study on Simone de Beauvoir...a pivotal work for study of Beauvoir's autobiographical oeuvre (Susan Bainbridge, Modern and Contemporary France)

Moi's brilliant analysis of her subject is de Beauvoir criticism at its very best, demonstrating that the richly stimulating text of Simone de Beauvoir deserves to be widely and well read. (Ursula Tidd, THES)

From the Publisher

This book is being published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of de Beauvoir's birth on 9th January 2008

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199238723
• ISBN 13: 9780199238729
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 349