Simone de Beauvoir par Éric Touya de Marenne (review)

Erratum: In the original publication, the author's name was misspelled as Éric Touya de Parenne. The correct spelling is Éric Touya de Marenne.

This short guide to the breadth of Simone de Beauvoir’s work in philosophy and literature is a valuable addition to the ‘Que sais-je?’ series and to francophone Beauvoir studies. It draws on a significant range of recent francophone and anglophone scholarship, which is summarized even-handedly. It focuses on seven main areas: Beauvoir’s life and memoirs; the influence and limits of her principal philosophical interlocutors such as Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty in the development of her work; her novels and short-story collections; Le Deuxième Sexe; her political commitments during the Algerian War and within the French second-wave feminist struggle; the post-1968 reception of Beauvoirian feminist theory in relation to equality and difference feminisms and the broader legacy of her thought for postcolonialism, universalism, and radical constructionist accounts of gender. In anglophone Beauvoir studies, there have been several short guides to her work published over the last fifteen years, some of which achieve greater depth and coverage than the present volume. This slim tome retreads that ground and, at its best, provides an introduction to Le Deuxième Sexe and its philosophical contexts and a useful survey of the reception of Beauvoir’s gender theory. But this comes at an inevitable cost, namely that of rapid summaries of some of the memoirs and novels and the omission of any discussion of La Vieillesse. Its approach is primarily philosophical and where literary texts are discussed at slightly more length, for example, Les Mandarins, there is sparse attention to Beauvoir’s literary techniques. Nonetheless, the volume is informative even if its aims are over-ambitious. It will interest the francophone reader who seeks a rapid overview of her work and an introduction to some of the key philosophical ideas of Beauvoirian existentialism and feminism.