5.0 out of 5 stars A great memoir

S.M. · 4 August 2024

5.0 out of 5 stars great book …

p.g. · 7 January 2017

great book ….as is second sex part 1…..and final ch….beauvoir (and we all have human contradictions) is one of the best thinkers and certainly one of the 2 or 3 most important of the last or even this centyury

5.0 out of 5 stars One marvellous book by a woman who was unafraid to ...

W. · 12 April 2017

One marvellous book by a woman who was unafraid to live and had a lot of important ideas to share.

4.0 out of 5 stars Great book. GOOD translation. Poor paper and font.

A.C. · 23 November 2016

I really like this book and feels like a good translation. Reason I am giving it 4 stars is that the edition is hard to read, words are too small and bblotchy it would be totally worth it to have it edited in better paper and font.

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

I.D. · 13 November 2017

Happy with product!

5.0 out of 5 stars Living Life to the full – the story of a young intellectual

A.S. · 26 September 2014

I appreciate it seems slightly odd writing a book review very many years after a book was written. Still, given the paucity of reviews of this exceptional mid twentieth century memoir of an intellectual, much of it certainly based on de Beauvoir’s earlier diaries, I think it is worth encouraging more people to read it.I enjoyed Simone de Beauvoir’s novels many years ago but never looked at her memoirs till now. I picked up ‘Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter’ some time ago in a second hand bookshop. Perhaps it was because I had recently read John Carey’s ‘the Unexpected Professor’ that I turned to it. The books are very different because people’s lives are very different but also because Carey’s covers almost the whole of his life to date whereas de Beauvoir’s is only about the young woman. Also, de Beauvoir’s is intensely personal. She was not afraid to depict herself as an intense (some might say neurotic) young girl, who had very grand ideas about her future (in a strictly non-materialistic sense) but turned from self examination to concern for the lives of others, although she retained her individualist philosophy. Both Carey’s and de Beauvoirs memoirs are highly accessible. You don’t need to be – or see yourself – as an intellectual, still less a philosopher, to enjoy this book.Both Carey and de Beauvoir are also united by their self-discipline. Nothing is gained without hard work (and when it came to hard work, de Beauvoir took that to extremes, the way she did with other aspects of her life). Other reviewers – and indeed de Beauvoir herself – have referred to her early happy childhood but in fact there were times during the (First World) war when she had very little to eat, her clothes were threadbare and she and her family moved from a pleasant apartment in Montparnasse to a smaller, cramped place with no bathroom.The memoir focuses not just on de Beauvoir and her parents, particularly as the young woman is maturing in her early twenties, but on her sister, her friends and the host of people she met at university and elsewhere. Determined to ‘live life to the full’ she (amusingly) recounts trips to ‘dens of iniquity’ (without ever indulging in iniquity herself). Painfully aware of her conventional upbringing, at a time when France was Catholic and young bourgeois women were expected to aspire to marry well, rather than have a career, Simone was determined to be very different. She risked ridicule by declaring to her parents and closest friends that she had lost her faith. In her early twenties she had (platonic) relationships with several men, including a married man, although intellectually she favoured ‘free love’ she knew, at least in her early twenties, that was, at least for her, an impossibility.We meet Sartre in the memoir only towards the very end. Simone notes how, very early on in their friendship, he declared he would never marry. Marriage was, for them and the other young intellectuals with whom they surrounded themselves, a route to conventional living – to be avoided at all costs. Simone spends much of her time worrying that her friend Zaza will be forced into marriage by her strict Catholic mother.I’m going to read the next book in Simone’s memoirs, of course: ‘The Prime of Life’ and, needless to say, am very much looking forward to it.

2.0 out of 5 stars Bad quality paperback

R. · 12 January 2023

I know is a paperback, but it is the sort of print that stains your fingers. Sent back.

4.0 out of 5 stars It makes you think!

". · 26 August 2002

I first encountered this at school, but that was some 25 years ago and I was dissuaded by a teacher from finishing it when she claimed that the concepts would be too adult for me. As I was only 14, she was probably right; although I found it very readable then, in a 'grown up school story' kind of way, I am getting much more from it now.I'm not well versed in the thinking of de Beauvoir, and not sure I'd agree with many of her opinions (her pro-abortion views horrified me) but this book made me consider deeply the reasons why middle-class people become socialists, and made me also think about the shackles which bound many intelligent women in the early years of the last century....Far from being deeply intellectual in its approach, this book is very readable, and made me want to find out more about de Beauvoir's life and work.

I received it on timely manner

S.M.S. · 17 August 2019

I liked the book and I read it for my enjoyment

all time fav

G. · 6 November 2023

it’s a lovely book ! My all time fav by Beauvoir’s !

Excellent experience with Wordery

N.D. · 28 March 2019

The book is in very good condition and reasonably priced. I am grateful that Wordery can source unusual and out-of-print books.

An Ambitious and Essential Read

A.D. · 15 January 2020

My first reading of this book was last year. My second reading was around the mid of this year. And my third reading was a few weeks back. From what I gather, reading a book as intense, mesmerizing, and inspiring as this one, – it isn’t fulfilling to have just read it once. The book carries such intimate confessions and it’s such a stimulating read, I fell in love with it. And not just that, it’s an experience to read about a woman’s conscious and self-awakening life. Her childhood, education, friendships, the temptation of ideals, the rejection of them.We’re told ambition is a destination, a solid rock upon which we scratch our names forever. But it’s really not. I see it as a passage to infinity. We can drop our bags, give up, resist, doubt, analyze, and hit the road again. The journey stretches itself out in myriad directions. Only that being on one of the routes gives us no choice but to assume that there aren’t others.There’s so much that resonates with me. Despite the fact that Simone’s life in no way stacks up against mine. But underneath the exterior, what roused in me, while reading the book, was Simone’s sharp incision into the becoming an individual person. It’s one thing to see in front of you the difference between a self and reality. It’s a whole other thing to feel it and have that drive you and make you ambitious… even emotionally and intellectually abundant. And that’s the exact presence of this book. It doesn’t have boundaries the way many books do. You feel infinite while reading it. And it sort of coincides with you realizing the scope of the ‘somebody’ that is you.If you’ve read my reviews, you know that I never give away the plot of the book; the events that transpire as you read it. I mean, you could just as easily search for the book on Google and get that for yourself. But what I love to focus on is the experience of reading a book, the numerous nuances, the telling revelations, it sort of threads a book together. Nor do I criticize or explicitly rate any book as if I’m supposed to as someone who writes and talks about books.Now, if you’ve never read any feminist literature or a memoir about a French philosopher, especially of such a distinguished school of thought, I highly recommend this book. It’s candid, thought-provoking, and definitely grounded. There are so many passages that I’ve highlighted. Generally, we have more takeaway in non-fiction than a fiction read. But reading this book feels so rare and rewarding that it’s hard to resist not re-reading those passages every now and then. It reveals philosophy, literature, existentialism, individualism, and such grave necessities of life, it’s hard not to think about it.One of the things that really stood out, for me, was her admiration for other people’s intelligence. The books they read, the conversations they had, the opinions they kept, basically the fidelity to have a choice and exercise that choice. It’s not enough to have a thought in your mind. But to sharpen it as unerringly as if it’s a muscle in your body. Well, our mind is a muscle but somewhere we lose the existence of it. Its physicality as much as its abstractness. So, in a way, to see it reflected in somebody else, you do feel the pulse-quickening within you to be able to do the same. Perhaps the whole point of human interaction is this. You justify your own self as having a solitary existence. And yet there’s nothing heavier that pushes us against the many selves we inhabit.

Must read

D. · 23 November 2023

Falls in the "must read" category if you are looking forward to read Beauvoir. Need I say more?