[In the following review, Fallaize outlines the themes of Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir.]

This volume [Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir] has a rather curious format, drawing together an overview of Toril Moi's well-known work on feminist literary theory by Michael Payne, an interview with Moi by Laura Payne, and two new essays by Moi on Simone de Beauvoir. In the second of her essays Moi addresses the question of why it is that readers of ‘La Femme rompue’ frequently refuse to read the story in the way that Beauvoir intended. Moi offers a series of brilliant analyses, converging on her central proposition that to share Beauvoir's position is to share her investment in epistemological control, and to condemn the narrator as incapable of generating stable versions of events. The reader resistant to authorial strategies, on the other hand, takes up the role of reader—victim, identifying with the narrator and accusing society and the husband of refusing the woman access to knowledge. However, Moi opens up a third position, that of the reader—analyst, who, accepting the treacherous nature of all knowledge, perceives both the blind intensity of the author's negative transference on to her character and the textual effects working against her own intentions. The seduction of this position, persuasively deconstructive of the bind into which the story often forces the reader, is undeniable, and it is tempting to retain it when considering this volume as a whole. As reader—analyst, we note another curious transference operating between the first essay, in which Moi explores the hostile trend in the reception of Beauvoir's work, and the pieces by Payne in which they continually return to the question of hostile responses to Moi's own work. Liberal critics, explains Moi, are often upset by Beauvoir's explicitly political and conflictual world-view. Moi, writes Michael Payne, has a ‘politically confrontational view of feminism’, while Laura Payne is eager to discuss ‘hostile responses’ to Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics. Understandably reluctant to take on this particular Beauvoirian mantle, Moi eventually steers the interview firmly away into a discussion of how feminists in the 1980s can position themselves in relation to Kristeva's notion of the three stages of women's time, and into an indication of the current direction of her work on Beauvoir. What interests Moi in particular is the problem of the intellectual woman's speaking position—a problem of which Moi appears to be gaining some experience. However, these essays on Beauvoir show that Moi is unlikely to abandon her willingness to enter into vigorous debate, and, in their powerful deployment of critical strategies adapted to feminist purposes, provide further evidence that Moi is working in the vanguard of feminist criticism and is clearly more than equal to her task of re-establishing Beauvoir as ‘the most important feminist intellectual of the twentieth century’.