Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, “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. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre – ‘the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen’.

Author Biography

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) French philosopher, novelist, and essayist, the lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir’s first book, L’Invitee, was published in 1943. In 1945 Beauvoir published Le Sang des autres, a novel dealing with the question of political involvement. Beauvoir’s breakthrough work was semiautobiographical Les Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Concourt. Roman Catholic authorities banned it and Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex (1949), in which Beauvoir argued that “one is not born a woman; one becomes one”. In 1958 Beauvoir published Memoires d’une jeune fille rangee, the first of four volume memoirs. She described her happy childhood, intellectual development and of course Sartre. It was followed by La Force de l’age (1960), La Force des choses (1963), and Tout compte fait (1972),