Where to start with de Beauvoir
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter brings freedom, gender, family, and intellectual ambition into the life that made the philosophy.
The Second Sex feels like a duty rather than a living book, and you want to meet de Beauvoir's questions at the point where she first lived them.
Reading the older abridged translation and missing a third of the argument; or reading only the famous chapters — One Is Not Born a Woman, the introduction — and missing that the book is a long phenomenological argument that builds across hundreds of pages of social, biological, and historical analysis.
Books in order
- Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter — The first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs — the warmest entry to her voice, and the autobiography of the Catholic bourgeoise upbringing that the philosophy is later answering.
- The Second Sex — The Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation. Volume One — Facts and Myths — is the historical and philosophical scaffolding. Volume Two — Lived Experience — is the phenomenology. Read the introduction twice. Read the conclusion last, and slowly.
Further reading
- The Ethics of Ambiguity — The textbook gentler de Beauvoir — a short philosophical essay on freedom and ethics. Not in this catalog yet.
- She Came to Stay — Her first novel — a fictional working-out of the same questions about freedom and the other. Not in this catalog yet.