Product Description

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre - 'the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36638 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-31
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) French philosopher, novelist, and essayist, the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir's first book, L'Invitée, was published in 1943. In 1945 Beauvoir published Le Sang des autres, a novel dealing with the question of political involvement. Beauvoir's breakthrough work was semiautobiographical Les Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Concourt. Roman Catholic authorities banned it and Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), in which Beauvoir argued that "one is not born a woman; one becomes one". In 1958 Beauvoir published Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, the first of four volume memoirs. She described her happy childhood, intellectual development and of course Sartre. It was followed by La Force de l'âge (1960), La Force des choses (1963), and Tout compte fait (1972),

Customer Reviews

Thoroughly absorbing
I picked Memoirs up in my school library, read the first few pages and was completely hooked. I haven't read any of de Beauvoir's or Sartre's work but would love to read more, starting with the next three volumes of her autobiography! It was intensly absorbing and drew me completely into 20s Paris; in addition I was fascinated by the frequent references to Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (read it, it's magical) and other literature. De Beauvoir has a memory for detail and builds up a vivid and often moving picture of her life and her emotions as a child and later.

Perfect for research
To be honest, if de Beauvoir had not had a relationship with Satre, I probably wouldn't have picked this book up, but that fact kept me going to the end. In the event, I loved reading her story, but much more the story of her tragic friend who lived the Christian life and obeyed her repressed mother. It's a wonderful depiction of upper-middle-class morals at the beginning of 20th Century Paris.

It makes you think!
I first encountered this at school, but that was some 25 years ago and I was dissuaded by a teacher from finishing it when she claimed that the concepts would be too adult for me. As I was only 14, she was probably right; although I found it very readable then, in a 'grown up school story' kind of way, I am getting much more from it now.

I'm not well versed in the thinking of de Beauvoir, and not sure I'd agree with many of her opinions (her pro-abortion views horrified me) but this book made me consider deeply the reasons why middle-class people become socialists, and made me also think about the shackles which bound many intelligent women in the early years of the last century....

Far from being deeply intellectual in its approach, this book is very readable, and made me want to find out more about de Beauvoir's life and work.