Wartime Diary
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Provocative insights into Beauvoir’s philosophical and personal development during wartime
Written from September 1939 to January 1941, Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary gives English readers unabridged access to a scandalous text that threatened to overturn traditional views of Beauvoir’s life and work.
Beauvoir’s clandestine affair with Jacques Bost and sexual relationships with various young women challenge the conventional picture of Beauvoir as the devoted companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. At the same time, her account of completing her novel She Came to Stay at a time when Sartre had just begun Being and Nothingness questions the traditional view of Beauvoir’s novel as merely illustrating Sartre’s philosophy.
Wartime Diary also traces Beauvoir’s philosophical transformation as she broke from the prewar solipsism of She Came to Stay in favor of the postwar political engagement of The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s emerging existentialist ethics reflect the dramatic collective experiences of refugees fleeing German invasion and life under Nazi occupation. The evolution of her thought also reveals the courageous reaffirmation of her individuality in constructing a humanist ethics of freedom and solidarity.
This edition also features previously unpublished material, including her musings about consciousness and order, recommended reading lists, and notes on labor unions. In providing new insights into Beauvoir’s philosophical development, the Wartime Diary promises to rewrite a crucial chapter of Western philosophy and intellectual history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Discovered after de Beauvoir's death and published in French in 1990, these seven notebooks beginning September 1, 1939, and concluding in January 1941 during the occupation of Paris by the Nazis describe the crisis faced by Europe in relation to the philosopher's own separation from her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre. He was serving in the military and was subsequently detained. De Beauvoir describes her obsessive love for Sartre's student Jacques Bost, as well as sexual relations with several young women, particularly a clingy Russian. Throughout, de Beauvoir works on her novel She Came to Stay, which editor Simmons argues was a precursor to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. What gives these notebooks additional zest and texture are allusions to an unexpectedly wide range of writers the diarist read during these searing days, including Gide, Malraux, Lawrence, Jack London, Agatha Christie, Dostoyevski and Margaret Mitchell ("quite delightful"), not to mention her deriving entertainment from low comedies starring the Ritz Brothers and W.C. Fields. Last and shortest, notebook seven is pure philosophy. English readers are now afforded a very different portrait of the feminist philosopher approaching middle age in this well-annotated volume.
