[In the following review, Epright and Hengehold evaluate Simone de Beauvoir in the context of rehabilitating Beauvoir's critical reputation.]

Until very recently, studies of Simone de Beauvoir have presented the French thinker either as the lifelong confidant, editor, and companion of Jean-Paul Sartre or as an early (and, some argue, dated and privileged) feminist and author of The Second Sex. Although Beauvoir's own philosophical writings include two monographs and numerous essays, articles, and letters, her contribution to the discipline has largely been ignored or dismissed as a mere footnote to Sartrean existentialism. Her novels, though immensely popular, have only begun to be approached in the same scholarly manner as the literary works of her male existentialist comrades.

Several factors, however, have contributed to a resurgence of philosophical and feminist interest in Beauvoir's work. Much of Beauvoir's correspondence with Sartre and some of her personal notebooks have been released by her adopted daughter, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir. The publication of this material, as well as the publication of some of Sartre's own letters and notebooks, has facilitated new research into the intellectual and emotional character of the couple's partnership. In addition, Beauvoir's work on ethics and embodiment makes a unique contribution to conversations within feminist theory, phenomenological and postphenomenological metaphysics, and philosophical ethics. For instance, the existentialist ethic carved out by Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cineas may have a significant role to play in the ongoing debate between proponents and critics of impartialism. Finally, the history of feminist reception and reaction to Beauvoir's work promises valuable insights into the psychology and politics of intergenerational conflict between women.

Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman and Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret Simons, are two outstanding examples of this recent surge in Beauvoir scholarship. Both books portray Beauvoir as a figure who can be—indeed, must be—read, evaluated, and taken seriously as a thinker in her own right, not as a mere disciple of Sartre. Both of these works situate Beauvoir squarely within the literary and philosophical tradition, as a writer responding to such thinkers as Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and as a theorist who herself influenced phenomenology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and moral theory.

Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir represents the first anthology dedicated exclusively to Beauvoir research. The fourteen articles in this collection can be divided roughly into three sections, dealing respectively with Beauvoir's relation to the philosophical tradition, her views on embodiment and sexuality, and her contributions to political theory and practice.

Jo-Ann Pilardi's catalogue of the feminist critiques leveled at The Second Sex during the 1980s and '90s provides an excellent background for the rest of this collection, since many of the controversies that she addresses are taken up by later articles in the volume. Such issues include the relation of The Second Sex to Sartrean existentialism; the charge that Beauvoir's work is “masculinist” (that it privileges traditionally male projects and activities); Beauvoir's positions on motherhood, the body, and female eroticism, especially lesbian sexuality; the tension between Beauvoir's commitments to socialism and existentialism; and finally, arguments that The Second Sex is ethnocentric and class-bound.

In the first part of the book, Karen Vintges, Eleanor Holveck, Michele le Doeuff and Sonia Kruks challenge the canonical view of Beauvoir as a Sartrean and explore her unique use of themes from Hegel, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Intrigued by various anomalies in Beauvoir's representations of her relationship with Sartre, and using evidence from Sartre's War Diaries, Kate and Edward Fullbrook make the challenging (if not entirely convincing) argument that it was in fact Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay that provided the impetus for the philosophical system carved out by Sartre in Being and Nothingness.

Some of the most interesting essays in this collection, linking Beauvoir to current feminist work in continental metaphysics and ethics, are those dealing with her views on the body and sexuality. Beauvoir has long been thought to have an essentially negative view of feminine embodiment and sexuality or to subscribe to Sartre's general characterization of the female body as an obstacle to transcendence. In this tradition, Celine Leon regards Beauvoir's ambivalence towards femininity as a sign of hostility toward positive sexual difference. Kristina Arp, by contrast, traces this ambivalence to Merleau-Ponty's conception of embodiment as a general existential structure making possible both freedom and enslavement. Finally, Julie Ward focuses on the social context that imposes multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings upon the female body in patriarchal society.

Debra Berghoffen and Barbara Klaw, likewise, depict a Beauvoir of intense interest to students of ethics and sexuality. Berghoffen reads the essay “Must We Burn Sade?” as a philosophical meditation on the ethics of sexuality and a continuation of certain themes developed in The Ethics of Ambiguity. “Sexuality in Beauvoir's Les Mandarins” views the characters of Beauvoir's novels as examples of various emotional and philosophical perspectives on feminine sexuality, from whose literary encounters the reader is expected to draw philosophical conclusions. Finally, Jeffner Allen's uniquely literary “response to a letter to Peg Simons, December 1993” examines Beauvoir's “myth-making activities,” including the myths that she herself promoted regarding her heterosexuality.

The final chapters in this collection address the relationship between Beauvoir's ideas and their political application. Margaret Simons argues that The Second Sex lay the foundations for the American radical feminism of the 1960s. In “Beauvoir and the Algerian War,” Julien Murphy situates the development of Beauvoir's ethical thought in the context of her own efforts to come to terms with the racial and political importance of her own situation as a French citizen. Murphy's essay is significant insofar as it focuses on the dialectical development of Beauvoir's ethical thought through her political experiences, where many commentators have read her activism as secondary to her literary and philosophical commitments.

Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman is not as wide-ranging as Simons's collection, though it addresses many of the same historical and existential issues. Neither a conventional biography nor a complete critical analysis of Beauvoir's work, Moi's book treats Beauvoir's life as a meditation on the emotional significance that writing holds for female students of philosophy, and the philosophical significance of emotional life for philosophers in general and women philosophers in particular. Focusing on three biographical “scenes,” Moi's narrative presents Beauvoir's intellectual rivalry with Sartre, her emotional and sexual partnerships, and her profound feeling of isolation from her mother (and the security that her mother's lifestyle promised to aging women) as philosophical problems whose possible solutions are illustrated by her life choices and her published work.

Moi's decision to treat Beauvoir's life as a single text suggests a sort of existentialist model for how contemporary feminists and feminist philosophers might think of their own lives as political, sexual, and philosophical “experiments in living.” One of the most exciting aspects of this book is its success in portraying the intellectual significance that many young feminist women still find in the emotional paradoxes of their own lives—paradoxes regarding the compatibility of sexual commitment and conceptual exploration, the fear of loneliness, the relationship between friendship and love, the delicate balance between challenging oneself and opening oneself to emotional or intellectual violence. The reader is also encouraged to reflect on the ways in which commitment to philosophy often results as much from female relationships as from the intellectual power of a masculinist culture or individual male colleagues and teachers.

These considerations, as Jeffner Allen's essay in the Simons collection also suggests, lead one back to the larger theoretical implications of Beauvoir's hitherto unacknowledged lesbianism. Both works make an important contribution to feminist scholarship by grounding contemporary questions regarding the heterosexuality or homosexuality of philosophical practice in the writing of feminist philosophy's own “mother.” They also call us to reflect upon the ways in which writing, philosophical or literary, mediates relationships between women of different generations. Moi characterizes her method in Making of an Intellectual Woman as genealogy, a term ordinarily associated with Foucault. This term, however, implicitly demonstrates the common commitment to micro-politics—the political and philosophical significance of everyday life—that Foucault and later poststructuralist political thinkers, including feminist philosophers, share with Beauvoir despite their skepticism regarding Sartre and their distance from certain forms of Marxism. Thus, just as these two texts give Beauvoir a philosophical future “beyond existentialism,” they also attempt to bridge the theoretical gaps that sometimes divide older and younger feminists, building “genealogy” of a different sort.