Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (review)

Abstract

Edward and Kate Fullbrook's new book, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (1998) builds on their earlier discovery, reported in Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1994), that Beauvoir's 1943 novel, L'invitée (She Came to Stay 1990), traditionally read as Beauvoir's application of Sartre's 1943 philosophical essay, Being and Nothingness (1956), was instead its philosophical source. In their new book, the Fullbrooks provide a comprehensive introduction to Beauvoir's philosophy, highlighting Beauvoir's early philosophical originality and the historic importance of her postmodern anti-universalism and her concepts of narrative self, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. Their study encompasses Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and The Second Sex (1952) and others such as Les Belles images (1968), Woman Destroyed (1969), and La Vieillesse (1970), her essay on old age entitled Coming of Age in the American edition. But where the Fullbrooks really shine is in their analysis of the philosophical program in Beauvoir's early fiction and nonfiction, texts often ignored by those who assume that Beauvoir's philosophy begins with Sartre.