These letters reveal a caring, loving Simone and her intellectual concerns between 1930 and 1963. What make these letters interesting are the many characters one meets in her novels are mentioned by their real names rather than their novelistic pseudonyms.
De Beauvoir is known more as one of the first driving forces for the ideals of Feminism, however, she was also a prize-wining novelist, political activist, philosopher and diarist. She also loved Sartre beyond measure.
The relationship between them, as written in the Introduction by De Beauvoir's daughter, was a "...notorious `morganatic union' allowing contingent loves." They had an `open relationship', one where other lovers were permitted yet they remained lifetime companions and lover's until Sartre's death in 1963.
What the letters also reveal, aside from her contemporaries actual names, was the couple's intellectual and relationship jealousies. As to there `self-created myth' of open relationship bliss, nothing could be farther from the truth...these jealousies existed.
As a professional writer, De Beauvoir wrote everyday. In one of her letters she mentions that one day during the week, she didn't have time to put pen to paper, she writes, "A day without writing tastes of ashes." She was an incessant scribbler, as her large body of work reveal.
Interestingly, as I've written somewhere before, reading letters, especially love letters, makes me feel like a violator or voyeur. That said, these letters are an important contribution to philosophical history, therefore, from an historical standpoint, that feeling of voyeurism is irrelevant.
If you are interested in the philosophy of existentialism and beautifully written love letters, (a vanishing art form) this text is highly recommended.
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