SOURCE: Atack, Margaret. Review of Simone de Beauvoir, by Toril Moi. Modern Language Review 91, no. 2 (April 1996): 485-86.

In the following review, Atack assesses the strengths of Simone de Beauvoir.

Although the corpus devoted to her work is not large compared to that of Sartre or Camus, Simone de Beauvoir has recently been gaining the critical attention she deserves as writer and philosopher. Toril Moi's book [Simone de Beauvoir] is particularly orientated towards the latter dimension, but the interdisciplinary framework she is mobilizing also encompasses the autobiography, some of the fiction, and the life. Her aim is to analyse how Beauvoir came to be ‘the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century’ (p. 1). Moi argues that she was able to produce Le Deuxième Sexe as a result of being placed at the centre of a unique configuration of discourses and situations and that the crucial moment was her...