ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir is best known for her feminist philosophical work The second sex where she takes an existentialist and phenomenological approach to discuss the treatment of women in history. However, de Beauvoir was also a “philosophical novelist”. In this chapter I explore her thinking around the process and product of women’s writing through the poetic use of “villanelles” and reference to works such as “My experience as a writer” (2014); her four volumes of autobiographical writings (1958, 1962, 1963, 1992), and The second sex (1949/2011). In many ways, de Beauvoir’s insistence that writing should be in conversation with both the individual and the universal to convey the meaning of lived experience in the world might be read, and it is taken up here as a feminist and critical autoethnographic provocation.
