Moving from the impact of educational institutions on Beauvoir to a representation of love, desire, and sexuality, Moi analyzes the conflicts and contradictions that shape intellectual women's lives, offering a new interpretation of Beauvoir's relationship to Sartre and to other women, and forging a new alliance between socio-historical and psychoanalytical perspectives.
"Sympathetic and critical, Moi's impassioned study never loses sight of the difficulty of Beauvoir's intellectual and personal journey through her life, it will send its readers back to Beauvoir's writings with a new sense of political necessity and possibility for women."--Professor Jacqueline Rose, University of London
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Review from previous edition This book makes us discover a Beauvoir analysed with sympathy but without complaisance. A worthy Beauvoir emerges: not the super-woman one so often hears about, but a complex, suffering woman who finds it hard to be different except in her jealousy and sorrow. But, what strength and what courage! She opened the way, and this book does her justice."--Julia Kristeva
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Sympathetic and critical, Moi's impassioned study never loses sight of the difficulty of Beauvoir's intellectual and personal journey through her life, it will send its readers back to Beauvoir's writings with a new sense of political necessity and possibility for women."--Professor Jacqueline Rose, University of London
"Thoroughly absorbing, this second edition of the most authoritative and comprehensive analysis of how Beauvoir became the emblematic intellectual woman of the 20th century is nothing less than brilliant...Moi blends biography, literary criticism, feminist theory, and social and historical analysis into an admirably clear work of impeccable scholarship...Essential." --Choice
Toril Moi was born and raised in Norway, and worked in England in the 1980s, before moving to Duke University in 1989, where she is now the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. She is the author of numerous influential books on feminist theory. Her study of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism was published to wide critical acclaim in 2006.
