ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is the author of an extensive oeuvre. Apart from The Second Sex, a series of autobiographies, a play, some philosophical articles and reviews, and a voluminous study on the position of old people throughout history, she wrote philosophical novels, a genre that gave her the opportunity to express her ideas about human existence in a non-academic form. In most of her novels she outlines, in indirect ways, her philosophical concept of an ethical self in contrast to other models of personhood - as is the scheme of Les belles images.
