The peak of Simone de Beauvoir’s literary career lies between the publication of her novel L’Invitée (She Came to Stay) in Paris in 1943, during the German Occupation, and 1954 when her last major novel, Les Mandarins, was published. Among her later works, her fiction seems rare and less impressive. Much of her time would be devoted to memoirs and autobiographical works, to her social study of old age, to prefatory and other essays. Besides, ever since she achieved international fame with Jean-Paul Sartre after the Liberation, she was engaged in public non-literary activities as the “first lady” of the postwar fellow-travelers of the revolutionary Left.

Globe-trotting in the company of Sartre, she paid visits to Soviet Russia, to Castro’s Cuba, to Mao’s China. They were usually given red-carpet treatment as exceptional cultural ambassadors by heads of state and leading government figures. It was an extraordinary enterprise: nothing quite like it has been seen before or since. The latter years of her life were marked by increasing militancy as a feminist. Although many of the new leaders of the feminist movement after 1968 found her standpoint outdated, they often acknowledged their debt to her, and to the striking existentialist insights of Le Deuxième Sexe, which she had published almost twenty years earlier.

Well before the “events” of May 1968, which brought Sartre renewed publicity, he and Simone de Beauvoir had ceased to dominate the Parisian literary and intellectual scene: existentialism had been overshadowed by other trends,