movement away from her parents’ rigid, petit bourgeois values. The second installment,The Prime of Life, spans the fullness of her years, from the summer of 1929 to the liberation of Paris in August, 1944. It begins on a note of relief at her emancipation from her family and closes on an even higher note of joy at France’s deliverance from the Germans. Beauvoir’s subsequent memoirs include La Force des choses (1963; The Force of Circumstance, 1965), Une Mort très douce (1964; A Very Easy Death, 1966), and Tout Compte fait (1972; All Said and Done, 1974). Her book on Jean-Paul Sartre’s declining years, La Cérémonie des adieux (1981; Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, 1984), is also deeply self-revealing.

In July, 1929, Beauvoir was a philosophy student at France’s most distinguished university, the École Normal Supérieure. Studying for her comprehensive orals, she was invited to join a small circle of male fellow-students who were also preparing for them; one of them was the intellectually dazzling Sartre. By the fall, they had begun a friendship and companionship that was to become a lifelong union. They agreed that, while theirs was an “essential” love, it should not be allowed to degenerate into constraint or mere habit; nor should their partnership prevent them from experiencing “contingent” liaisons with others. Moreover, they promised neither to lie to each other nor to conceal anything from each other. They considered theirs an enduring alliance “of the mind, the imagination and the senses.” After all, they shared a passionate commitment to thinking, to writing, to individual freedom, to words, words, words. “One single aim fired us,” states Beauvoir, “the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it.”

Sartre and Beauvoir initially decided on a “two-year lease” for their relationship, then renewed it for their lives. Since they intended to pursue their respective careers and anticipated long periods of separation, and since neither desired children, they saw no need to marry. By the spring of 1934, however, when Sartre was offered a position at a lycée in Le Havre and Beauvoir a similar posting in Marseilles, at the opposite end of France, he did offer to marry her so that they could both teach in the same preparatory school. She declined his proposal, to safeguard their independence. By 1936, both she and Sartre were teaching in Paris. They became the reigning couple of a group they termed “the Family.” The unchanging core of this unit consisted of the Kosakievicz sisters, Olga and Wanda (both of whom Sartre bedded), and Jacques-Laurent Bost, a brilliant journalist who married the moody Olga and was also an occasional bed-partner of Beauvoir. She and Sartre would congratulate themselves for having originated a new social network, a chosen rather than genetic family.

Beauvoir’s association with Olga Kosakievicz, who had originally been her nine-years-younger pupil, was particularly close. She found the Russian girl to be an intelligent and sensitive companion with whom she could talk intimately about everything. Yet the Sartre-Beauvoir-Kosakievicz-Bost quartet never attained the equilibrium and harmony in fact that Sartre and Beauvoir considered attainable in theory, since Olga’s shifting moods kept the others continually off balance. Olga’s intrusion into the intimacy Beauvoir and Sartre were enjoying provided Beauvoir with the plot for her acclaimed novel L’Invitée (1943; She Came to Stay, 1954).

The 1930’s were extremely active years for Beauvoir. She read voraciously, discovering Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, among others. She frequented, usually with Sartre, cafés, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, grubby pubs, jazz dives, and lively, long-lasting parties, strolling, scribbling, and talking with enormous energy. To the urban Sartre’s discomfort, she loved to clamber up steep and stony hillsides in search of ancient ruins, to conquer rock walls, to hike through not only France but also Spain, Italy, and Greece, seeking mountain peaks to conquer.

As World War II approached, Beauvoir and Sartre finally abandoned their apolitical, self-interested individualism, which excluded meaningful concern for others. They were, to be sure, broadly in favor of social justice, but they remained indifferent to the day-to-day occurrences of domestic and world politics. The atrocities committed by the Nazis at last convinced Beauvoir and Sartre, in mid-1939, that war was inevitable and that they needed to commit themselves to political action. After some unsuccessful Resistance work, however, they concentrated on their writing, and they made their literary reputations during the German Occupation. With the Allied entry into Paris, Beauvoir ends her book with an ardent appetite for further challenges: “. . . the more I saw of the world, the more I realized that it was brimming over with all I could ever hope to experience, understand, and put into words.”

Simone de Beauvoir occupies a deservedly central place in the history of feminism. In The Second Sex, she uses existential notions of people’s need to establish their freedom in a purposeless, absurd universe to encourage women no longer to resign themselves to the role of the weaker and inferior person in relation to a man. In much of her fiction, such as the novel Les Mandarins (1954; The Mandarins, 1956), she describes women whose dependency on men has hobbled their ability to construct satisfying lives for themselves. As much as any writer, she is responsible for inspiring women’s movements throughout the world.

In The Prime of Life, however, Beauvoir’s influence on women’s issues, and hence women’s literature, is a mixed one. She frequently asserts her claim that highly charged emotional relationships are amenable to rational control, that people can rigidly compartmentalize their emotional and intellectual needs. Yet her autobiography testifies otherwise. She admits that “. . . my body had its own whims, and I was powerless to control them; their violence overrode all my defenses.” Her sexual appetites, she discovers, “were greater than I wanted them to be” and greater than she cared to avow to Sartre, despite their pact of absolute candor with each other. “By driving me to such secrecy my body became a stumbling block rather than a bond of union between us.” Yet she provides the reader with no advice on how sexual relationships are to be conducted or what role physical affection is to play in one’s personal life. In Beauvoir’s fiction, most affairs bring humiliation and destruction to women.

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that much of woman’s psychological self is socially constructed, with few physiologically rooted feminine qualities or values. One assumes that she would question much of the American feminist concern for “women’s culture” and “feminist studies.” In The Prime of Life, she describes marriage and family life in generally negative terms, with coolness toward relatives and no interest in children. She has achieved autonomy from parental control, barely mentions her mother, and devotes only one paragraph to her father’s death in 1941.

Beauvoir carefully explains her rejection of motherhood:[Sartre] was sufficient both for himself and me. I too was self-sufficient. I never once dreamed of rediscovering myself in the child I might bear. . . . Maternity itself seemed incompatible with the way of life upon which I was embarking. . . . By remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function.

It can be argued, however, that both she and Sartre acted out parental roles in their relationships with students and other young people whom they admitted to their circle. In this regard, their ultimately failed friendship with Olga Kosakievicz provides a provocative example, since Beauvoir depicted the pains of the Beauvoir-Sartre-Kosakievicz triangle in She Came to Stay, whose publication justified her claim to be a writer—and not to be a mother. In The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir gives birth not to children but to her career. Surely, a number of other talented women have been encouraged by her work to do likewise.