Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction by Kate Fullbrook, Edward Fullbrook

Fullbrook, Kate and Edward. Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.

Simone de Beauvoir, for all her literary success and status as feminist icon, holds precious little street cred. Few of her casual readers are aware of her graduate degree in philosophy or of her philosophical texts. Even those who know her better often accept her self-identification as a non-philosopher, although the Sorbonne examiners who made her second to Jean-Paul Sartre called her “the true philosopher” of the two. French encyclopedias call her Sartre’s disciple, and feminists gnash their teeth over her relationship with him. Kate and Edward Fullbrook (a literature professor and freelance writer/philosopher, respectively) along with a growing chorus of Beauvoir scholars, will have none of it.