This book was a very interesting insight between the relationship of author and reader. The dynamic is a reciprocal one in many ways and this book is an excellent exploration of this relationship.

This is an excellent collection of letters by a leading writer of the 20th Century. It captures the multi dimensional nature of her writings. I strongly recommend it, You will not regret it.

Ik ben fan van het werk van Simone de Beauvoir, en heb haar twee romans 'De Tweede Sekse' en 'De ouderdom.' gelezen.

Dit boek gaat voornamelijk over de briefwisseling tussen De Beauvoir en haar lezers.
Een must-read voor fans, geeft inzicht in deze bijzondere vrouw.

Sex, Love and Letters provides an intimate portrait of the intricacies of Simone De Beauvoir's psyche and relationships. It's fascinating to analyse de Beauvoir's work and its significance through the lens of the sociopolitical context and her correspondences with individuals, ranging from adoring fans to Sartre. The text is well organised, and broken in to chronological chapters, which I really appreciated.

I received a complementary copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

In this book, Coffin explores the letters sent to Beauvoir and her relationship with the correspondents. An intimate portrait is revealed of an intricate woman. The writing is fairly clinical, but there are lots of footnotes to keep you right.

This was an interesting exploration of the reception and significance of Simone de Beauvoir's work by examining the explanations she offered and how people responded to her in letters, from confessional fan mail to collegial messages from other great thinkers to her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. It was an engaging way to approach the subject, although I would have wished for an appendix with some of the letters in their entirety.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

Simone de Beauvoir has long been regarded in history for her work, as well as for the desire she had for a boy that was 18 years younger than her. The author explored Simone's works and of the acceptance of her work in a much more conservative time. This was a really interesting read!

A true treasure trove of letters.A look at a time in history revealing open people sharing their thoughts .I was fascinated by Simone de Beauvoir previously and this added to my interest.#netgalley#cornell upress

This is an interesting reception history of de Beauvoir's writings but its parameters could perhaps have been tautened. While the strand that is being promoted in the title and blurb is the archive of letters from readers which dB collected and saved, the book itself ranges around far more widely.

The opening two chapters look at the specific reception of The Second Sex first in the media, and secondly in relation to Kinsey and Freud and their writings on sexuality. While interesting, these don't strictly pursue the stated remit of following 'Beauvoir's relationship with her readers from 1949 to 1972' and are an extended preamble.

It would perhaps have been useful to have had a theoretical and methodological chapter somewhere near the beginning: Coffin does discuss some of the theory on letters and the epistolary genre but it comes a good way into the book. I'd liked to have seen more discussion, too, of the impact of the one-way archive on Coffin's readings: we have the readers' letters to dB but not her replies.

Those caveats out of the way, there is much that is fascinating here: Coffin is very good at contextualising the letters in terms of contemporary politics - I was especially fascinated by her readings of political shame in the post-war years of reckoning with the Occupation and collaboration, and the section on the Algerian war, especially the torture and rape of Djamila Boupacha and the way critics, the media and readers responded to dB's cool denouncement of the French authorities. This was not what I had expected from the book - the later sections on issues such as female sexuality, desire, and abortion are where I expected this book to go, so the expansion was a welcome adjunct.

The very idea of reading reception through an archive of readers' letters is itself a welcome intervention - and the specificities discussed here foreground the way in which dB spoke for generations of women and how we have found ourselves in her books.

Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir
Judith G. Coffin

Though well known, The Second Sex (1949) is only part of the works of Simone de Beauvoir. A prolific writer of essays, fiction, diary entries, and volumes of memoirs. An exuberant writer of letters, she corresponded with her audience who did more than offer fan letters. They engaged in intellectual conversations with Beauvoir, and vice versa, delivering to us the closest we can get to becoming time travelers.

What we get close up are conversations on the excruciating aftershock of World War Two, personal lives, philosophers and writers of the day, political attitudes and a reciprocal sense of strong relationships between author and audience.

This book is like finding buried treasure!

What a fascinating saga. I knew Simone de Beauvoir more by reputation than anything else, but Ms Coffin quickly sorted that out, and form there you are plunged into an absolutely fascinating world of... well, the title says it all. I'm not norally one for reading other people's mail, but on this occasion, I'm glad that I did.

Sex, Love and Letters is a well written and detailed analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s works, their reception primarily in French and American society, her influence on feminist thought and the discussion of “women’s” questions with the added bonus of looking through the lens of correspondence written to Beauvoir by both her fans and critics. I am most impressed by the author’s organization. The chapters are organized chronologically according to the dates of her publications and the historical backdrop of their reception. Within each chapter, the author bolsters her analysis of the public’s review of Simone de Beauvoir’s books with a summarization of the various sentiments thematically represented in letters de Beauvoir received, along with snippets and a few longer excerpts from said letters.

Almost half of the book is dedicated to an analysis of The Second Sex: first as it was reviewed within the context of post-WWII France recovering from the humiliation of German occupation, then in the resulting decolonization of France’s colonies; second as a comparison to the Kinsey reports coming out of the US in the mid-1950s that sparked a cultural, sociological, scientific and psychoanalysis of sex; third as a second-wave feminist outlook in the 1960s.

Simone de Beauvoir not only broke taboo by speaking publicly about sex and women’s roles within marriage and society, she also upset a lot of people’s apple carts when she spoke out against France’s use of torture during Algerian war, specifically using as an example the very public case against Djamila Boupacha, a female Algerian militant, who was arrested, tortured and raped by the French military in 1960. Her publications The Prime of Life and Djamila Boupacha brought on a new wave of correspondence that dealt with people’s personal shame at staying quiet against the Vichy government, Nazi occupation and the Algerian war, and thus feeling complicit in the crimes brought about by the French government and military. Of course there were a good many who did not commend her for speaking out against the French military’s use of torture. Unlike with regards to women’s sexuality, French society did not want to acknowledge the existence of torture and what that meant to their morals.

If you pick up this book hoping to read full translations or even long excerpts of letters written to Simone de Beauvoir (like I did), you will be disappointed. These letters are quoted throughout and some chapters feature more than others, but as I mentioned before, the author primarily uses the letters to categorize the public’s very personal sentiment and reaction to Beauvoir’s philosophies as it applied to their own lives. Who would benefit from this book? Those readers who just can’t get enough of Simone de Beauvoir and her works; or scholars who study women studies and gender politics through the framework of French philosophy, post-WWII or the Algerian war. Caution: you may walk away with an overwhelming nostalgia for letter writing and the strong desire to pen fan mail to all the influential celebrities and writers in your life.

This was a real find, and I'm glad to have had access to an advance copy. It's a history of the twentieth century at the pen of an extraordinary woman. Loved it.

Concise, informative, well-researched; Coffin's book delves critically into Simone de Beauvoir's body of work, themes and letters, whilst presenting the way the historical period influenced SdB's writings.