Simone De Beauvoir And Jean-paul Sartre: The Remaking Of A Twentieth-century Legend
by By Fullbrook, Kate and Fullbrook, Edward
Category: Biography & Autobiography , Philosophers

He was France's best-known philosopher and chief arbiter of intellectual fashions during the postwar era. She was the most influential forerunner of today's feminist movement, who nonetheless seemed to live in the shadow of a great man. So goes one of the great cultural legends of our time. The only problem, as Kate and Edward Fullbrook point out in this beautifully written and meticulously researched portrait, is that it is wrong.Using newly available documentary evidence from diaries and letters, the authors shed astonishing new light on precisely who was the dominant partner in this relationship.By carefully tracing the dates of composition of some of Beauvoir's and Sartre's major works, the Fullbrooks demonstrate that Beauvoir, rather than Sartre, was the primary creative influence behind the couple's most celebrated ideas. In writing his acclaimed Being and Nothingness, Sartre acted primarily as an interpreter of a philosophical system already worked out in Beauvoir's novel, She Came To Stay.This astonishing discovery is at the heart of the Fullbrooks' absorbing account of Beauvoir's and Sartre's childhoods and their first twenty years together as a couple who changed the intellectual outlook of the world. By reworking the chronologies of the couple's writings and rereading old information in light of the new, the Fullbrooks arrive at a revisionary account of the couple's intimate lives, whose radical sexual freedom must now be understood as stemming from Beauvoir's rather than from Sartre's personal needs.The book provides decisive insights into the lives, literature, and ideas of two major figures on the modern cultural scene, and raises profound questions as to the psychological needs, sexual politics, and bad faith that led Beauvoir and Sartre to give misleading accounts of the inner workings of their relationship. Kate and Edward Fullbrook have written a book destined to be widely discussed and hotly debated.