The Second Sex changed how I viewed sex and gender, and to read about this woman was amazing. Her ideas were revolutionary and I was curious about what experiences help formulate her views. This was such a great read and an exciting reflection of someone important.

Becoming Beauvoir is a great biography of a great woman who has been hidden behind a man's back. It is a strong and detailed portrait of a famous philosopher.

Interesting portrait of an interesting woman in a fascinating world. It ran on a bit long for me in certain places and I expected a bit more "hot goss" but overall, it was a good read. Not for the casual reader.

As a teenager in the 1980ies, I discovered Beauvoir and it was like someone opened a door to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman. In the last three decades, whenever something new was published by her or about her, I was sure to obtain and read it. Naturally, I was excited to pick this up. First up, I think this is an incredibly accessible and readable book, it's neither too academic, nor too flowery and I certainly appreciated this. Second, I think that Kirkpatrick's aim to centre Beauvoir's feminism and philosophy was great. Yet, for me, the thing that was the biggest let down was that I did not feel Beauvoir was given much space in this book to become an actual person. She remained a theory, a figment at times, someone who only lived in the pages of books than actually a person who lived and breathed.

This is a fascinating work of non-fiction, which I certainly learnt from.  The narrative is engaging and accessible, and I would highly recommend it.

This is an excellent and accessible biography of a complex woman which deals with both her life and her work while also covering her many relationships. Ms Kirkpatrick obviously knows her subject and the philosophy is woven through the narrative in a way that helps to highlight how de Beauvoir developed her ideas - and more importantly how many of the ideas and concepts were developed independent of Sartre. The fact de Beauvoir always seemed to be second to Sartre is well covered and there is enough depth to enable you to see how the primary relationship in de Beauvoir’s life influenced her through the years.

It was useful several times to remind myself of the time this all took place. During the Second World War and shortly thereafter de Beauvoir was in several convoluted and simultaneous affairs. This was a time when morality was far less relaxed than the life would allow. de Beauvoir did as she pleased and several of the relationships may have been considered inappropriate but Ms Kirkpatrick doesn’t shy away from tackling the issues. This is an honest attempt at a life not a hagiography.

I think it should be read by anyone interested in the philosophy of feminism and the writer of The Second Sex but also anyone interested generally in the intellectual history of the time, of existentialism and French intellectual development. This is an enjoyable and well paced book with no requirement for the reader to be a philosopher but the ideas influence the life and this is clearly illustrated.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Fascinating look at Simone Beauvoir draws us into her world her life.A biography that makes the subject human not just an iconic figure.Excellent story of this iconic figure.#netgalley #bloomsbury academic

This biography is brilliant, it’s well written, and clearly the author has spent a lot of time on her research. This is one of the best biographies I have read in ages (and I read a lot!) it is detailed but not boring as the author draws you into Beauvoir’s world. 
Brilliant.

My very first book about Simone de Beauvoir and I loved every detail about her life.

The biography was well written and kept me very interested and entertained, mainly because Beauvoir was a fascinating woman. Such an extraordinary philosopher and novelist! I was blown away by her life story, so many interesting qualities in one tiny person. What caught my big attention was the years during Nazi occupancy, she didn't join the resistance, and continued to write and publish her works. Although her devotion and relationship with Sartre were confusing to me. I was also amused by an unusual "family" they have created. 

Great story about remarkable woman and feminist. I think the book was a bit too long, nevertheless, it was worth the time I spend reading it.

Although I have read one biography, about the relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and John Paul Sartre, that was a long time ago and I had never read a book solely about her, so I did really enjoy it and felt that I really learnt a lot and had a sense of what de Beauvoir was like and of her character.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the biography for me, was her early years.   Her relationship with her sister and parents were very revealing; in particular that with her mother, which is so central for a woman.   Her parents had a very loving relationship  to begin with, which was soured by money problems and her father’s complete inability to learn a living.   These were scenes of genteel poverty and partly led to the, extremely bright, Simone’s desire to forge out her own life and career, in a time when marriage was seen as the ultimate goal.

Undoubtedly, Simone de Beauvoir wanted to reconcile hopes of independence and love, when such desires were difficult.  We read of her desire to study philosophy and, of course, much of the book deals with her relationship with Sarte.  Along the way, of course, we also have historical events, such as the advent of war and the impact that had on her life. 

Overall, this was a very readable account of a life which was controversial.   Also, importantly, Kirkpatrick keeps de Beauvoir at the centre of the story and never allows her to be over-whelmed by the presence of other people; either male, or female, in her life.   I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

I really enjoyed this well-researched, accessibly written and intelligent biography of Simone de Beauvoir. Poor old Sartre doesn’t come out of too well – but then perhaps he doesn’t deserve to. De Beauvoir comes across as the complex woman she obviously was, and definitely not one who was second in any way to Sartre as she has so often been portrayed. And what a full and interesting life she led, all of which is carefully and fully documented here. Essential reading for anyone interested in her life, her writing and her continuing influence.

I've always been fascinated by Simone de Beauvoir and was happy to read her biography even if I read her autobiographical books.
Even if I didn't find a lot of new things it was an interesting and engrossing read.
It's well researched and well written.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Its tricky to write a gripping biography of someone who wrote so much about their own life. This is efficiently written and very much from a feminist perspective, but there wasn't much of anything new - though I am sure it was me missing stuff. For a De Beauvoir student or  fan I think this would be a really excellent read. For a dilettante like me it felt a little dull.

Simone de Beauvoir produced a massive body of work. Not only did she do it while being one of the preeminent scholars of her youth (and later) but also while playing a major part in being the architect of existentialism and modern-day definers of feminism.

This book does not only play a key part in defining Beauvoir for who she was by delving into recent discoveries, e.g. her correspondence with Claude Lanzmann, but also by showing how media, in extremely anti-feminist and patriarchal senses, tried to display de Beauvoir as a kind of sidekick plaything for Jean-Paul Sartre.

The woman Beauvoir became was partly the result of her own choices. However, Beauvoir was acutely aware of the tension between being a cause of herself and a product of others’ making, of the conflict between her own desires and others’ expectations. For centuries French philosophers had debated the question of whether it is better to live life seen or unseen by others. Descartes claimed (borrowing Ovid’s words) that ‘to live well you must live unseen’.

Sartre would write reams about the objectifying ‘gaze’ of other people – which he thought imprisoned us in relations of subordination. Beauvoir disagreed: to live well human beings must be seen by others – but they must be seen in the right way.

This book weaves together what de Beauvoir stood for, believed in, constructed, changed, and championed, throughout her life. It’s a chronological book where Kirkpatrick has gone to lengths to excise de Beauvoir from the myths that have sadly followed her legacy around. Kirkpatrick shows, with clarity, how both magazines and translators have misconstrued and obscured what de Beauvoir created. Here is one example:

In spring 1953 the first English translation of The Second Sex was published. Blanche Knopf, the wife of the publisher Alfred Knopf, had heard people talking about it when she was in Paris. Her French wasn’t good enough to assess the work herself; she thought it was some kind of intellectual sex manual so she asked a professor of zoology to write a reader’s report. H. M. Parshley wrote back praising it as ‘intelligent, learned, and wellbalanced’; it was ‘not feminist in any doctrinaire sense’. The Knopfs wrote back: would he like to translate it? And please could he cut it down a bit? (Its author, Knopf said, suffered from ‘verbal diarrhea’.) In French, The Second Sex was 972 pages long. In correspondence with Knopf, Parshley said he was cutting or condensing 145 of them – deleting nearly 15 per cent of what Beauvoir said.

Parshley had no background in philosophy or French literature, and he missed many of the rich philosophical connotations and literary allusions of Beauvoir’s original French, making her look much less rigorously philosophical than she was. He also cut sections and translated material in less- than-innocent ways. The hardest hit section was the one on women’s history, where he deleted seventy- eight women’s names and almost every reference to socialist forms of feminism. He cut references to women’s anger and oppression but kept references to men’s feelings. He cut Beauvoir’s analysis of housework.

When she saw what Parshley had cut, Beauvoir wrote back that ‘so much of what seems important to me will have been omitted’. He wrote back saying that the book would be ‘too long’ if he didn’t cut it, so Beauvoir asked him to state outright in the preface that he had made omissions and condensed her work. But he was not as forthright as she hoped.

In America the book was not billed as an ‘existentialist’ work because Blanche Knopf thought existentialism was a ‘dead duck’; she had, in fact, asked Parshley to play it down in his preface. When Parshley’s preface appeared he said that since ‘Mlle de Beauvoir’s book is, after all on woman,not on philosophy’ he had ‘done some cutting and condensation here and there with a view to brevity’.‘ Practically all such modifications,’ he writes, ‘have been made with the author’s express permission.’

In a 1985 interview Beauvoir said that she begrudged Parshley ‘a great deal’. (A new English translation, with the missing pieces restored, would not be published until 2009 in Britain, 2010 in America.)

I recently reviewed Deirdre Bair’s Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir, that only to a limited extent works as commentary on Bair’s biography of de Beauvoir. Bair makes it clear that de Beauvoir wanted to present anything but a one-dimensional picture of herself; Kirkpatrick comments on the memoir by including correspondence and diary entries to flesh everything out, to paint a final picture.

I do not think Kirkpatrick claims to have painted a final version of de Beauvoir as she clearly recognises her subject to have been a multi-faceted being, as with most humans. This is how Kirkpatrick paints her: an extraordinary human who downplayed her own role in different areas of life, while constantly changing herself, á la Epicurus.


Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unknown, Simone de Beauvoir
Kirkpatrick does not shy from displaying de Beauvoir’s mental riches, achievements, and critique.

When discussing that Sartre incorporated de Beauvoir’s ideas in his Being and Nothingness and criticising him for parts of his book and philosophical theory:

[…] claiming that Sartre ‘stole’ Beauvoir’s ideas is problematic, both historically and philosophically. Historically, it is problematic because their relationship was one of ‘constant conversation’ and mutual (if not exactly reciprocal) intellectual encouragement. And philosophically, it is problematic because both Beauvoir and Sartre were steeped in French philosophical sources that neither of them bothered to cite in their works, let alone claimed to own.

An additional difficulty arises because initially Beauvoir was the kind of philosopher who thought that what mattered about a philosophy was not who had the idea; what mattered was whether it was true or not. In the 1940s, she would be very critical of the concept of ‘possession’. But she was also very critical of Sartre. Later in life she would realize that the idea of possession plays an important role in the perpetuation of power, and who is remembered by posterity. Being and Nothingness contained a concept that Beauvoir and Sartre had discussed together throughout the 1930s. It was present in When Things of the Spirit Come First and went on to inform Beauvoir’s later work in powerful ways. But it was Sartre who would become famous for it: bad faith.

In her memoirs Beauvoir said that ‘we’ discussed bad faith when describing the emergence of this concept in their thinking in the 1930s. As Sartre described it in Being and Nothingness, bad faith was a way of fleeing from freedom, which consists in over- identifying with either ‘facticity’ or ‘transcendence’.

Facticity stands for all of the contingent and unchosen things about you such as the time or place in which you were born, the colour of your skin, your sex, your family, your education, your body. And ‘transcendence’ refers to the freedom to go beyond these features to values: this concerns what you choose to make of the facts, how you shape yourself through your actions. For Sartre, bad faith arises when facticity and transcendence are out of joint in a way that makes an individual think they are determined to be a certain way. He gave the famous example of a waiter: he is in bad faith if he thinks his facticity – i.e., the fact that he is a waiter – determines who he is. The waiter is always free to choose another path in life; to deny this is to deny his transcendence. On the other hand, if the waiter thinks it doesn’t matter that he is a waiter when he applies to be a CEO, then he is in bad faith for the opposite reason: he has failed to recognize the limits of his facticity.

This might sound trivial – but what if you replace the word ‘waiter’ with the word ‘Jew’ or ‘woman’ or ‘black’? Human history is full of examples of people reducing other people to a single dimension of their facticity and, in doing so, failing to recognize their full humanity. In 1943, it was crystal clear that that habit did not only belong to humanity’s past. But Sartre didn’t make this ethical move in Being and Nothingness. Nor did he give a satisfactory answer to the ethical problem of objectifying others there. Rather, he said that we must not take ourselves to be determined by our facticity – because whatever the conditions of our existence, we are free to make the most of them.

Already in the 1930s Beauvoir was convinced that this was wrong. Sartre thought human beings were free because whatever their situation they were free to ‘transcend’ facticity by choosing between different ways of responding to it. Her challenge was this: ‘What sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve?’ There is a difference between having freedom (in the sense of being theoretically able to make a choice) and having the power to choose in the actual situation where your choice has to be made. She would go on to articulate her philosophical criticisms in two philosophical essays in the 1940s, Pyrrhus and Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, but in the meantime she had to deal with the fallout from She Came to Stay in her personal life.


Simone de Beauvoir, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Their relationship was interwoven, to and fro, throughout their lives:

In the memoirs Beauvoir said that the only thing that might have changed her mind about joining this bourgeois institution was children. And while in her teens she expected to be a mother she no longer foresaw this as a possible future: she had come to see childbearing as ‘a purposeless and unjustifiable increase of the world’s population’.58 Whether for rhetorical or genuine reasons, Beauvoir frames her decision not to have children in terms of her vocation: a Carmelite nun ‘having undertaken to pray for all mankind, also renounces the engendering of individual human beings’. She knew she needed time and freedom in order to write. So, as she saw it, ‘By remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function’.

So, instead of marrying, Beauvoir and Sartre revised the terms of their pact: their relationship had become closer and more demanding than it had been when they first made it. Now they decided that although brief separations were permissible, long solitary sabbaticals were not. Their new promise was not life- long; they decided they would reconsider the question of separation when they entered their thirties. So although Marseille would separate them, Beauvoir left Paris on a firmer footing – with a clearer future – with Sartre.

Simone de Beauvoir with Claude Lanzmann, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Simone de Beauvoir with Claude Lanzmann, left, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
This book contains many elements of de Beuvoir’s life: love, academia, writing novels, critique, her extreme ups and downs with people, for example Nelson Ahlgren…

This book is very well constructed: its elements are in place and paint a full picture. de Beauvoir stands as a full human being in this book, which is both sobering and cleansing; this book is not a hagiography, thank Bog.

I recommend to read this book and also Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails.

In this fascinating biography, Kate Kirkpatrick provides an insightful examination of the life and work of this most iconic of figures. 

In the process she separates myth from reality and provides a somewhat alternative view from how de Beauvior was perceived by many in the past. 

The reassessment of her complex but crucial relationship with Sartre forms one of the central themes of the book. 

As is pointed out, when de Beauvior died, all of her obituaries had mention of Sartre but in many of his, she was not mentioned at all. Rather than being a follower, acolyte or even muse of Sartre, de Beauvior was an original thinker and at least his equal. 

The biography deals with not only the evolution of her philosophy, but also her rather tangled and unconventional private life, which scandalised many in society at that time. 

This biography has been able to make use of previously unpublished letters and diaries providing new dimensions. 

Although at first sight to the general reader this may appear to be a somewhat complex subject, the biography is in fact most accessable and provides a balanced and nuanced appreciation to this still influential writer and philosopher.

I voluntarily read this ARC for an honest review
All thoughts and opinions are mine

Although a name I was familiar with, I can say I knew very little about her life
This was a very immersive, well researched book and I thoroughly enjoyed it

I would highly recommend this

Offers great insight into a singular intellect. It makes her less of a symbol and more of a person with real heart and soul. Loved it.

In this monograph, Kate Kirkpatrick offers a complex and nuanced window into Simone de Beauvoir's life and her philosophical writings, painstakingly addressing the controversies, contradictions, and conditions that shaped her life. What I found truly admirable about this biography was the author's application of Beauvoir's philosophy in recounting her story. By this I mean that the author clearly details Simone de Beauvoir's life as a process of irreversible becoming, showing the ways in which over time Beauvoir evolved as a person and as a philosopher and making clear the interrelationship between the two. This is critical, because as Beauvoir once said, 'there is no divorce between philosophy and life. Every living step is a philosophical choice.' This becoming, as the author also makes clear, was informed by Beauvoir's lifelong questioning: How could a person live a life of devotion to others and live a life for oneself, i.e. how could one maintain one's agency and freedom and also love another? And how was this question informed by one's situational context, i.e. one's class, one's gender, one's ethnicity, the time and place in which one live, and the nexus of one's relationships. For no one exists in isolation, and the process of becoming is continuous. As such, this biography also serves as a poignant reminder about the dangers of reducing a person to a single moment in their life, because in Beauvoir's words, 'there is no instant in a life where all moments are reconciled.' Thus, while the younger Beauvoir failed to recognize that she was a 'token woman' and thus did not see tokenism as problematic, a much older Beauvoir did. This recognition in the 1970s led Beauvoir to use her voice to amplify the voices of others. In a special 1970s issue of Les Temps modernes, a journal that she co-founded with Sartre in 1945, she acknowledged that she had 'more or less played the role of the token woman,' because she had believed that it was the best way to overcome barriers of sexism. But younger feminists had made her realize that this stance inadvertently made her complicit in perpetuating inequality and so she was now calling out tokenism and herself for having taken part in in. This is not to say that Beauvoir recognized all her failings and the author in no way suggests that she does. Instead the author sensitively and critically notes both her successes and her failures in translating her philosophical values into an ethical life. By doing so, the author escapes the trap of mythologizing Beauvoir. We have instead a biography that captures the ambiguity of a life lived. 

"The history of my life itself is a kind of problematic, and I don't have to give solutions to people and people don't have a right to wait for solutions from me." -- Simone de Beauvoir

Highly recommend this biography for the glimpse it gives you of Simone de Beauvoir's continuous process of becoming and for the questions in the telling that the author implores the reader to ask of themselves.

<b>ENGAGING AND ENLIGHTENING - JUST THE WAY A BIOGRAPHY OUGHT TO BE</b>

Last year I read [book:The Second Sex|457264] and was floored by the intelligence and depth. Still, I didn't spare much thought for the woman who wrote it. That was  mistake. Reading this book has opened my eyes to the amazing woman, Simone de Beauvoir.

<b>👍 WHAT I LIKED 👍</b>

<u>Writing</u>: Writing a biography of a fiercely intelligent women like Beauvoir could have been a challenge - how do you translate her life, her thoughts and her ideals so ordinary humans can understand them and sympathise? Kirkpatrick made it seem like the easiest thing in the world. Her writing was engaging and enlightening, making the subject come alive on the pages.

<u>Subject</u>: I loved how Kirkpatrick tackled Beauvior's life. She didn't just address her literary career or her relationship with Jean-Paul Satre as many other authors have done. She dove into the depth of Beauvoir's life with special emphasis on addressing the discrepancies between Beauvoir's own memoirs and her diaries, which I thought was a very interesting POV.

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick is an important and interesting update on Beauvoir's life and philosophical thought. Much like her belief that one is always becoming her life's story is also always becoming.

Although I have read all of her work that is in English translation as well as previous biographies, I think this biography would be fine for someone new to her life's story. I do think at least some general grasp of French existentialism of the period would be helpful but again I don't think it would be necessary. In bringing new material into contact with previous biographies, Kirkpatrick's book serves as a different type of biography from the rest while also serving as a bit of an addendum.

There is a lot less philosophical analysis here than I expected but I'm not sure that is entirely a bad thing. This is still a biography first even if part of its purpose is to correct previous impressions that her thought was derivative of and unilaterally influenced by Sartre. There is enough general discussion of ideas from her diaries along with dates that clearly show that many of what became known as Sartrean ideas were either hers first or concurrently but separately. Once they met and started their relationship, I think it is disingenuous to believe that she suddenly quit having original ideas. More likely is that they generated ideas together and, as much due to the times as her willingness to publicly anoint Sartre as the philosopher, left much of the philosophical writing (as in what the philosophical community would consider philosophical writing) to Sartre.

Some readers might want more of a gossipy book with more scenes about life in Paris, but there is enough of her life here to illustrate how she lived her theory, so to speak. I'm not sure what including more street life would do other than make it more palatable for the portion of the public that really looks for that rather than ideas. That said, I will agree a bit more would have been nice but I think Kirkpatrick included enough to make the points as she was making them.

One of the things that can make reading Beauvoir's works difficult in the sense of formulating some kind of unified thought is that she was always less concerned with some single monolithic static philosophy than with a dynamic and changing one. That is why what can seem contradictory between early writing (even in the diaries) and later writing isn't always so. Yes, sometimes she is likely guilty of being less than open in either or both instances one might look at, but more often she is being truthful in each case based on who she was and what she believed at each time. The parts of her thinking that stayed relatively consistent was attention to grappling with the ethics of the relationship between self and other, the ethics of existentialism. While she shifted on what might qualify as ethical she never lost sight of trying to understand and articulate that position.

I recommend this for anyone interested in de Beauvoir, Sartre, Existentialism, 20th century philosophy, and feminist thought. Depending on your avenue into her world, different parts of the book will likely speak more powerfully to you. I haven't touched on it but the use and integration of the personal and the philosophical in writing is throughout the book and reading it makes us appreciate her contribution to the relatively recent trend toward such writing being more accepted.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.