ABSTRACT
In the strange cultural landscape of 1960 womens loomed up, Cassandras of women’s experience, an experience that was everywhere silenced, concealed and denied. A generation of women – and men – ransacked their work for ‘truths’ about the human condition, and, especially, for the truth about women. Margaret Walters insists, too, that: ‘there is a very real sense in which Simone de Beauvoir presents herself as an exemplary figure.’ It is true that she was often seen, popularly, as a malignant rather than as an inspiring example. For Simone de Beauvoir it is the claustrophobia of the foyer that threatens the integrity of the self. The young ‘self’ of her autobiography, The Prime of Life, escapes into the solitude and even the dangers of the hills Marseilles. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing assume, tacitly, in their way of talking about their sense of smallness and futility, that human life ought to be purposeful, rational and coherent.
