Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony

This is the first full-length study to explore Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical and biographical writings in the context of her ideas on selfhood as formulated in The Second Sex and other philosophical essays of the 1940s. Ursula Tidd presents a detailed analysis of Beauvoir’s engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and race, as part of her auto/biographical strategy in seeking to write herself into the male-constructed autobiographical canon. Tidd offers new readings of Beauvoir’s unpublished diaries and recently published letters along with more well-known philosophical and autobiographical texts.