SOURCE: Montfort, Catherine R. Review of Simone de Beauvoir, by Toril Moi. French Review 70, no. 1 (October 1996): 125-26.

In the following review, Montfort provides a brief overview of the three main subsections of Moi's Simone de Beauvoir, concluding that the book is a powerful and significant contribution to feminist cultural history.

The normal posthumous reevaluation of the work of Simone de Beauvoir has been eagerly anticipated, in part because of startling new facts about her private life unveiled in her Journal de Guerre, her Lettres à Sartre (1990), and Bianca Lamblin's Mémoires d'une jeune fille dérangée (1993). Lynne Kaufman's latest play, Shooting Simone is a case in point, in which a young female American reporter soon discovers that her idealized picture of Beauvoir does not correspond to reality.

Toril Moi's fascinating new book [Simone de Beauvoir] attempts to capture Beauvoir's unique position in our century. While Moi takes into...