"This is an eloquent, clear-eyed, and readable portrait of an immensely complex and brilliant woman, and her ambivalence about being perceived as one. In this general but deeply researched biography, Lisa Appignanesi moves from the young philosophy student through her love affairs with Sartre, Algren, and Lanzmann through to her radicalized later years, contextualizing these events within de Beauvoir’s work, avoiding facile biographical readings of it. On the contrary: the life and work come together here in mutually-reinforcing urgency. De Beauvoir is as relevant now as seventy years ago and this is an excellent overview of why."

"‘What a lot Lisa Appignanesi has packed into such a slim volume. This is the ideal introduction to Simone de Beauvoir, capturing the woman, the philosopher, the lover, the public intellectual, and the fluidity between these roles. Appignanesi is brilliantly nuanced on the emotional costs of de Beauvoir’s complicated ‘pact’ with Sartre and on the way the philosophy emerged, hard-won, out of the life. It’s a book that’s attentive to de Beauvoir’s times and alive to her urgent relevance to ours."