Product Description

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.

She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200571 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-01
• Released on: 2005-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060825195
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"It is a book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way." -- New York Times

"This is perhaps the best piece of writing Mlle. de Beauvoir has yet done; the translator does it justice." -- Saturday Review

"[Beauvoir’s] graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal in recording the emotional and intellectual birth pangs of a fascinating woman." -- Time

Review
"This is perhaps the best piece of writing Mlle. de Beauvoir has yet done; the translator does it justice." (Saturday Review )

"[Beauvoir's] graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal in recording the emotional and intellectual birth pangs of a fascinating woman." (Time )

"It is a book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way." (New York Times )

About the Author

French Existentialist philosopher, novelist, essayist, editor, and groundbreaking feminist Simone De Beauvoir was born in Paris, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of the feminist classic The Second Sex, several volumes of autobiography, and highly acclaimed novels, including The Mandarins, winner of the Prix Goncourt.

Customer Reviews

Portrait of the artist as a young girl
For people who are already familiar with Beauvoir's writing, this autobiographical writing is maddeningly dense. It's almost entirely unleavened with the lightness or spaces you'd expect from prose, even autobiographical prose, and this can make it very hard to read in places.

Initially, as I was reading the book, I was really resistant to it. Even though beautifully written, it was frustrating to wade through the encyclopedic portrait of her girlhood, and I truthfully didn't understand the point of all the microscopic detail.

However, when I reached the latter part of the book, with the attention to her studies, I started to feel like I understood. This felt to me, in the end, to be an exhaustive catalogue of the person who began to think, so we (the reader) could come to understand why she thought the way she did. She doesn't spare herself, uncompromisingly addressing her faults and sharing the caustic remark that Weil had to make about her. She also provides a sense of her biography via books-- discussing what books she was reading when and how they impacted her. As such, I finally found this book extremely valuable.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people start here with Beauvoir, and in my opinion that's a serious mistake. To begin with her prose, I'd recommend 'She Came to Stay' or 'The Woman Destroyed'. For a biographic overview I'd recommend Dierdre Bair's biography. I'm going to be looking forward, myself, to reading volume 2 of the autobiography.

Pure French Flavour
Simone de Beauvoir, Parisian pioneer in existentialist philosophy and author of feminist theory in "The Second Sex", tells all in the first of a four part autobiography, "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter".

Her book is a tumult of turbulent love, teenage angst, philosophical concepts and some clever insights. Raised in a conservative bourgeois family, she is educated and cared for, but her developing intellect forces her to reject the religion and materialism imposed upon her. She writes intricately of her relationships and the experience of a woman defining herself against a restrictive society.

To write an autobiography, it's necessary to have a sense of self-importance which motivates thorough disclosure. De Beauvoir demonstrates this when describing her interactions with Jean-Paul Sartre, "we used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself". She writes about her childhood with an adult perspective. Of her two-year old tantrums she explains, "I felt I was not only the prey of grown-up wills, but also of their consciences, which sometimes played the role of a kindly mirror in which I was unwillingly and unrecognisably reflected". Although this comment seems misplaced when attributed to a two-year old mind, it is evidence of her intelligent analysis.

Like other renowned intellectuals this century, she disowns her bourgeois background without acknowledging that its status allows and encourages intellectual thought. This was brought to her attention during a conversation with another student who said, "the only thing that matters in the world today, is to feed the starving people". De Beauvoir retorted, "the problem is not to make men happy but find the reason for their existence" to which the student replied, "it is easy to see you have never been hungry".

What kept me reading was the concise and often poetic writing style, the vivid characters and descriptions of life in France in the 1920s. Also, her insights leading to the rejection of her indoctrinated religion including, "His perfection cancelled out His reality", and "I had subtle arguments to refute any objection that might be brought against revealed truths; but I didn't know one that could prove them".

The book is intimate and honest which leaves a great imprint of de Beauvoir on the reader. It was less philosophical and more self-indulgent than I had hoped, but an interesting insight into a prized mind.

the Realm of Existentialism
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the first of Simone de Beauvoir's four autobiographies.

"The most innocent conversations were full of hidden traps; my parents construed my words with their own idiom and ascribed to me ideas that had nothing in common with what I really thought. I found myself repeating Barres' phrase: 'Why have words when their brutal precision bruises our complicated souls'. As soon as I opened my mouth, I provided them with a stick to beat me with, and once more I would be shut up in that world which I had spent years trying to get away from, in which everything, without any possibility of mistake, has its own name, its set place and its agreed function, in which hate and love, good and evil are as crudely differentiated as black and white, in which from the start everything is classified, catalogued, fixed and formulated, and irrevocably judged; that world with the sharp edges, its bare outlines starkly illuminated by an implacable flat light that is never once touched by the shadow of doubt."

In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir lives in a stark black-and-white world with no gray areas or blurred edges. Everything is stiff and rigid -- almost suffocatingly so -- she cannot breathe (philosophically speaking) and cries a lot. "Dutifulness" has a death-grip around her throat! She abhors blatant tradition, mindless religious rites and glaring absurdity -- but, she loves Paris, books, her first cousin Jacques, writing and nature!

The Luxembourg garden in Paris (filled with picturesque fountains, diverse minds and fragrant flowers, near the Sorbonne university) plays a major (inspirational) focal point in her formative years. At a very early age, Simone decides she will become a world renowned writer -- but, in order to accomplish such a feat, must give up any idea of marriage and children -- at least in the traditional sense. She plans to focus all her creative energies toward her #1 passion, writing.

A meticulous undertaking, satisfying -- very "Dutiful". --Katharena Eiermann, 2007, the Realm of Existentialism, Presidential Hopeful