SOURCE: Howells, Christina M. “The Making of Beauvoir.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4753 (6 May 1994): 22.

In the following review, Howells treats the multiple approaches to biography in Simone de Beauvoir.

Toril Moi's subtitle [of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman] gives a clear indication of the substance of her work. Professor Moi examines what Simone de Beauvoir made of what had been made of her—what Sartre, in his study of Flaubert, calls the stages of “constitution” and “personalization”, or, in terms closer to Engels, how Beauvoir made history on the basis of what history had made her. And Simone de Beauvoir would surely have liked Moi's historical, even dialectical, method—to be the object of an intellectual biography written with both acumen and empathy. Beauvoir's own biographies are all of her own life, making her both the subject and the object of study, the analytic and...