PositiveThe Financial TimesThis is where the significance of Eilenberger’s story really lies. Not one of these women was defending existing freedoms, because not one of them had ever been able to take freedom for granted in the first place ... All four women walked on the outside of power, politics, and philosophy, which is why their vision of what the world had become by the middle of the 20th century is so acute.
Kate Kirkpatrick
RaveThe New Statesman (UK)...[an] excellent new biography ... Kirkpatrick’s biography shows why we’ve much more to learn from Beauvoir than the tiresome bad faith involved in being a woman in a crassly gendered world ... If it has been difficult to appreciate this radical Beauvoir until now, this is partly due to the trashing her reputation received immediately after her death ... The Beauvoir reintroduced to us in this book is a full and critical partner in Sartre’s existentialist project. Kirkpatrick has combed through Beauvoir’s student diaries (as yet untranslated), the more recently published letters with Lanzmann, and previously uncollected and unpublished writings to show us a complex woman who knew – long before her detractors – that the stakes in existentialism were profoundly moral and political ... If \'there’s one thing to learn from the life of Simone de Beauvoir\', Kirkpatrick concludes, \'it is this: no one becomes herself alone\'. More than 30 years after her death, we’ve barely begun to understand what this means.
