Simone De Beauvoir (Modern Novelists)

Taking account of recent biographies and posthumously-published works, this study sets de Beauvoir's fiction withing the context of her life and works as a whole, before examining each of her stories in detail: her earliest collection of takes; her first published novel; the novels of her "moral period;" the prize-winning Les Mandarins; and her final stories, written in the 1960s, including one not published until 1992. The continuities and the developments in de Beauvoir's major themes are analyzed, and the distinctive features of her artistic acheivements are assessed. (No knowledge of French on the part of the reader is presupposed.)