[In the following review, Montfort provides a brief overview of the three main subsections of Moi's Simone de Beauvoir, concluding that the book is a powerful and significant contribution to feminist cultural history.]

The normal posthumous reevaluation of the work of Simone de Beauvoir has been eagerly anticipated, in part because of startling new facts about her private life unveiled in her Journal de Guerre, her Lettres à Sartre (1990), and Bianca Lamblin's Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (1993). Lynne Kaufman's latest play, Shooting Simone is a case in point, in which a young female American reporter soon discovers that her idealized picture of Beauvoir does not correspond to reality.

Toril Moi's fascinating new book [Simone de Beauvoir] attempts to capture Beauvoir's unique position in our century. While Moi takes into account both Beauvoir's life and her writing, the subtitle of the book stresses that she sees Beauvoir as a distillation of different discourses and determinants. Consequently Moi's analysis relies on reception studies, the sociology of culture, philosophical analysis, psychoanalytic inquiry and feminist theory.

The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a textual moment in Beauvoir's work. In Part I, the textual moment is the 1929 conversation between Sartre and Beauvoir in which Beauvoir's philosophical ideas are discussed in the Luxembourg gardens. This conversation, described in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, casts Sartre as Beauvoir's superior both intellectually and philosophically. Moi explores Beauvoir's speaking position as represented in her writing in 1958, and explains Beauvoir's perception of being “second to Sartre” as a compromise between the wish to fascinate as a woman and the wish to fascinate as an intellectual—a woman should not be perceived as superior. Moi argues convincingly that Beauvoir's account of Sartre's superiority is unconvincing. After all, in 1929, Beauvoir was only twenty-one and would soon become the youngest agrégée in philosophy in France. Moi also argues that Beauvoir's conclusion about her own intellectual ability is the result of a number of factors—social class, gender, religion and location of birth. She then explores the striking hostility of Beauvoir's critics, and describes the difficulty Beauvoir experienced in being taken seriously. Critics reduced her texts to her own persona and described her politics and philosophy as mere displacements of the personal or as effects of her personal relationship to Sartre.

In Part II, Moi examines Beauvoir's representations of the conflicts and contradictions confronting an intellectual woman in mid-century France. The textual moment is a conversation with Sartre in 1946 during which Beauvoir came to realize that the intellectual consequences of being born a woman are different from those if one is born a man. Moi begins by focusing on Beauvoir's philosophical and psychological underpinnings in L'Invitée. Her psychoanalytic inquiry makes for suspenseful reading as she investigates why Françoise after going through the illusion of communion with Pierre feels the need to assert her independence from Xavière by killing her. Moi makes a case that the killing of Xavière (seen as a fantasmatic mother) is the raison d'être of the novel. She also investigates Sartre's and Beauvoir's differences in their understanding of women's position. After analyzing passages in Being and Nothingness and in L'Invitée, she concludes that in the arena of women's freedom, Beauvoir's analysis is more subtle than Sartre's. Moi then turns to The Second Sex and underlines its paradox: The most antipatriarchal text of the century reads as if it were written by a dutiful daughter all too eager to please her father. Nevertheless, she reminds the reader of its startling originality in 1949 when women issues were not central to the political agendas of any major party nor was there an established women's movement.

In Part III, Moi chooses as her textual moment the end of La Force des choses when Beauvoir expresses feeling of sadness, emptiness and disappointment which she attributes to old age. This is fascinating reading as Moi turns to Beauvoir's autobiographies, letters and diaries to uncover the reason for Beauvoir's depression—whether it is Sartre's pacts with her (the pact of freedom and the pact of openness), her own ‘schizophrenia,’ or her relationships with other women. She shows that Beauvoir does her best writing when she faces separation and depression.

Moi concludes on a note of admiration for a pioneer woman who opened intellectual doors for women, but is quick to add that her admiration is not worship. This book is a rich and powerful contribution to the cultural history of feminism in the late twentieth century—a must read.