[In the following review, Howells treats the multiple approaches to biography in Simone de Beauvoir.]

Toril Moi's subtitle [of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman] gives a clear indication of the substance of her work. Professor Moi examines what Simone de Beauvoir made of what had been made of her—what Sartre, in his study of Flaubert, calls the stages of “constitution” and “personalization”, or, in terms closer to Engels, how Beauvoir made history on the basis of what history had made her. And Simone de Beauvoir would surely have liked Moi's historical, even dialectical, method—to be the object of an intellectual biography written with both acumen and empathy. Beauvoir's own biographies are all of her own life, making her both the subject and the object of study, the analytic and sympathetic observer of her psychological development, always split yet never distanced from herself. Beauvoir and Sartre both allowed posterity access to their personal letters—written, perhaps, with posterity in mind as the ultimate recipient?—in the interests of scholarship, and with an explicit distaste for intimate secrets, the inner life and private journals (the recourse of virgins and priests, as Roquentin dismissively commented).

Moi's own most frequent methodological reference points are the works of Pierre Bourdieu and the philosophical feminism of Michèle le Doeuff. But Moi's work is very much her own, and it is marked in particular by its explicit acknowledgement of its own situated nature, its “subjectivity”—not as opposed to some impossible “objective” perspective, but rather recognizing itself as the work of a feminist thinker in the 1990s, half a century after the pioneering enterprise of Beauvoir. And the historical aspect of Moi's study has a compelling fascination; we learn of the gradual accession of women students to the agrégation (the demanding competitive examination for would-be lycée and university teachers), to university education and ultimately to the prestigious Grandes Ecoles (which went “mixed”, incidentally, even more recently than Oxford colleges). But the young Simone de Beauvoir was initially impervious to the institutionalized sexism of her time, feeling herself to be on an equal footing with her male contemporaries, “second only to Sartre” and unquestioning of the naturalization of patriarchal attitudes even in student society. It seems to have been the writing of Le Deuxième Sexe itself that finally converted Beauvoir to active feminism, and it was not until 1971 that she accepted the term as applying to herself. In this respect, Beauvoir's philosophical universalism clearly interfered with her political radicalism.

Similar conflicts of interest would also appear to apply in Beauvoir's sexual and social life. Defining “lesbian” as exclusively homosexual permitted her to deny her own lesbianism without even admitting—still less proclaiming—the lesbian practices of her bisexual period. She seems to have reserved the notion of true sexual relations for the sphere of heterosexual romantic passion, and was able to convince herself of the triviality—and contingency—of her physical relations with other women. Indeed her seductions of young pupils, male and female, and of some of Sartre's lovers, do not make pleasant reading, even in Moi's tolerant version. In this context we may consider Moi's analysis of the discussions of bad faith in L'Etre et le néant and L'Invitée (She Came to Stay). Moi argues convincingly in favour of Beauvoir's more sensitive and complex female perspective on an episode in which a male suitor forces the pace of a first date by taking a woman's hand. Sartre emphasizes the bad faith of the woman who pretends to herself that she has not noticed what has happened; Beauvoir stresses rather the aggression and implicit power of the male action. But even if we concur with Moi's preference for Beauvoir's analysis, Beauvoir herself appears ultimately to be judged by it—a sexual predator, using the trappings of seduction and her own prestige as a teacher to amuse herself (and Sartre vicariously) by engaging in loveless sex which she frequently claims sickens her.

Moi analyses Beauvoir's life, art and philosophy as a totality traversed by the conflicts and contradictions of her age. One of the most disturbing recurrent motifs concerns precisely Beauvoir's conception of masculinity which is privileged in a way contemporary feminists necessarily find unpalatable. Beauvoir sees humanity, philosophy and analysis as non-gender-specific, but their characteristics are all those of the masculine. This makes Beauvoir, initially at least, an “honorary male” in her inability to recognize the problem. And of course, as Moi argues, it is in this sense too that she is a product of her age: she was not able, historically, to step outside the parameters of thought that imprisoned her. Not, that is, until times had changed significantly, and the French women's liberation movement had raised the profile of female oppression in the 1960s and 70s. Moi sets out, using a combination of sociological, psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives, to reinstate Beauvoir to her rightful position as a feminist precursor, in the face of her current unpopularity. Her portrait of Simone de Beauvoir disturbs our good consciences by showing us how historically determined our politically correct attitudes remain. How many contemporary feminists—or post-feminists—would have escaped domestic drudgery had they been born in 1909? Simone de Beauvoir was the woman who allowed our current easy hostility to the sexism of which she was a victim and which she herself, to some extent, inadvertently embodied.