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By turns surprising and revelatory, this sixth volume in the Beauvoir series presents newly discovered writings and lectures while providing new translations and contexts for the author's more familiar writings. Spanning the author's career from the 1940s through 1986, the pieces explain the paradoxes in her political and feminist stances, including the famous 1972 announcement of a “conversion to feminism” after decades of activism on behalf of women. The book documents and contextualizes the author's thinking, writing, public statements, and activities in the services of causes like French divorce law reform and the rights of women in the Iranian Revolution. In addition, the book provides new insights into the author's complex thinking and illuminates her historic role in linking the movements for sexual freedom, sexual equality, homosexual rights, and women's rights in France.

This book offers an abundance of newly translated essays by the author that demonstrate a heretofore unknown side of her political philosophy. The book documents and contextualizes the author’s thinking, writing, public statements, and activities in the services of causes like French divorce law reform and the rights of women in the Iranian Revolution. It traces nearly three decades of her leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the “two-state solution” in Israel. Together these texts prefigure the author’s later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization. The book provides new insights into the author’s complex thinking and illuminates her historic role in linking the movements for sexual freedom, sexual equality, homosexual rights, and women’s rights in France.

This book brings to English-language readers literary writings—several previously unknown—by the author. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of the author’s career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into the author’s writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. Highlights of the volume include a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, the unpublished 1965 short novel “Misunderstanding in Moscow,” the fragmentary “Notes for a Novel,” and an eagerly awaited translation of the author’s contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, “What Can Literature Do?” ALso available in English for the first time are prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales, La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.