ABSTRACT
Paris 1920-1930) and her memoirs, Shakespeare and Company (1960). In these she did not discuss the lesbian nature of her relationship with Monnier.
(1908-86). Born into a bourgeois family in Paris, de Beauvoir was sent to the Cours Adeline Desir, an educational establishment for young girls in 1913 where she met Elisabeth Le Coin, called Zaza by de Beauvoir, who entered the school in 1918. Zaza was by all accounts de Beauvoir’s first great love, and one of a number of women with whom she was involved during her lifetime. In 1925 de Beauvoir decided to become a lycée teacher. She went to the Sorbonne to study, and subsequently, until 1943, earned her living as a school teacher, first in Marseilles and then in Rouen and Paris. In 1929, while a student, she met the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre with whom she developed the philosophy of existentialism, and with whom she was engaged in a life-long and often uneasy relationship. While teaching at Rouen, de Beauvoir became involved with one of the pupils, Olga Kosakiewitch. At de Beauvoir’s behest, the relationship also included Sartre. Gradually de Beauvoir found this triangular relationship more and more difficult. In 1936 de Beauvoir obtained a teaching post in Paris where, in 1939, she embarked on a brief affair with her pupil Bianca Bienenfeld whose great love she was. At the beginning of the Second World War she then had an affair with another of her pupils, Nathalie Sorokine, who was madly attracted to de Beauvoir, a feeling not entirely reciprocated by the latter. In the course of the Second World War de Beauvoir decided to give up her teaching post and focus on her writing. Her much acclaimed first novel, L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), which details the problematic of a triangular relationship between two women and a man, appeared in 1943. In 1945 de Beauvoir was the object of Violette LEDUC’S violent passion but de Beauvoir felt unable to reciprocate except at the level of literary mentor. From 1946 de Beauvoir was co-editor of the journal Temps Modernes. Together with Sartre she undertook many journeys and political speaking engagements. At this stage she did not have the reputation as a key feminist of the twentieth century, which she has come to enjoy since and which rests in part on her text Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) that appeared in 1949, in which she famously asserted that one was not born but made a woman. This notion has since been taken up by many feminist theorists, who argue that ‘woman’ as a concept is a patriarchal or man-made construct. In 1954 de Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt for her novel Les Mandarins (The Mandarins). From 1958 de Beauvoir began to produce her five-volume autobiography. Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) was the first volume; in 1960 it was followed by La Force de l’âge (The Prime of Life), and in 1963 La Force de choses (Force of Circumstance) was published. During this period, the early 1960s, de Beauvoir met the 18-year-old philosophy student Sylvie Le Bon with whom she embarked on a relationship that was to last until the end of de Beauvoir’s life, and which culminated in her adoption of Sylvie in 1980. This allowed them to share the same surname. During the 1960s de Beauvoir was also very much politically active, speaking out both against the French war in Algeria and against the Vietnam War. In 1968 La Femme rompue (Woman
Destroyed) was published, receiving much critical attention. In 1970 La Vieillesse (Old Age) came out, followed by Tout compte fait (When All Is Said and Done). From 1970 de Beauvoir became increasingly involved with feminist politics. Following Sartre’s death de Beauvoir published his letters. Her own correspondence was published, after her death, by Sylvie Le Bon. This correspondence documents, inter alia, de Beauvoir’s love of women.
