[In the following review, Fallaize comments on the historical significance of Simone de Beauvoir in terms of its subject and its analysis.]

This eagerly-awaited book [Simone de Beauvoir] comes as a beacon in Beauvoir studies, presenting a forceful case for Beauvoir as the greatest feminist theorist of our century whilst simultaneously identifying in her intellectual and emotional trajectory a series of emblematic dilemmas which patriarchy continues to pose to intellectual women today. Thus in an illuminating investigation of the making of Simone de Beauvoir, Moi shows how Beauvoir's speaking position was constrained by the educational capital it was open to her to amass, and demonstrates why Beauvoir needed her fantasy of unity with Sartre. The question which Angela Carter asked—why ‘a nice girl like Simone wasted her time sucking up to a boring old fart like J. P.’ (p. 253)—thus receives a rather more satisfactory answer than hitherto. As a female philosophy agrégée with close contacts with the male elite Normaliens, Beauvoir was an exceptional woman but a marginalized intellectual. In Le Deuxième Sexe she was thus in the curious position of ‘investigating her own marginality from a position of centrality’ (p. 68). The tension produced by the conflict between Beauvoir's belief in her own legitimacy and her intermittent awareness of her actual marginalization deeply marks Beauvoir's work, Moi argues, and accounts for much of the hostility of the reception accorded to it. What Beauvoir actually offers in Le Deuxième Sexe, for Moi, is a ‘strong theory of human agency and a positive as well as a negative concept of freedom’ (p. 153). Despite the absence of any real discussion of the relationship between the anatomical and the social (a gap which Moi suggests could have been plugged by a less diffident use of Lacan) Beauvoir nevertheless manages to develop a strikingly original theory of the construction of female subjectivity under patriarchy. Moi is frank about the other problems that have touched some feminist raw nerves—the obsessive, even sexist, sexualization of some of the terminology deployed, the wild overestimation of masculinity, the ease with which Beauvoir herself becomes a victim of the very patriarchal categories she describes. But, as Moi points out, the women readers who were first inspired by Le Deuxième Sexe were drawn in by a sustaining Utopian vision which Moi argues could today offer a way out of the dead ends of identity politics. The final section of the book, though full of insights, is the least satisfactory one: after reviewing the history of Beauvoir's cycles of anxiety and depression, exacerbated by her commitment to Sartre, Moi claims that Beauvoir produces her best writing in those texts where she forced herself to confront her sources of pain. This argument is not well supported, although the earlier extremely persuasive reading of L'Invitée in which the final murder becomes the killing of a fantasmatic maternal monster shows us what an attentive reader of Beauvoir Moi can be. This is a deeply original and stimulating book, of significance not only as a leap forward for Beauvoir studies and for feminist enquiry but as a model of how the critic can apprehend a subject whose life and legend are so towering as to threaten the critical enterprise itself. Toril Moi succeeds brilliantly in this challenge.