ABSTRACT
Romantic love has long been acknowledged as something of a problem or paradox in the work of Simone de Beauvoir. As Madeleine Gobeil and Bernard Frechtman observe in a 1965 interview, not one of Beauvoir's female characters is 'immune' from love; as the interviewers themselves put it, Beauvoir 'like the romantic element'. When addressing love in her major contribution to feminist thought, Beauvoir certainly has a tendency to accentuate the negative. Upon reading Beauvoir's diaries for the years 1926-30, what is initially most striking is just how much space within them, as Beauvoir herself is only too aware at the time, is devoted to love. In coming to understand woman as the 'Other' of man by the late 1940s, Beauvoir is led to nominate for her thought a new Good — namely, the liberation of women from our historical status as Other.
