That much having been said, and notwithstanding marked unevenness in the quality of the Beauvoir texts and the commentaries, there remains much to recommend this book. In the first volume of the University of Illinois Press’s ‘Beauvoir Series’ (Philosophical Writings, 2004), editors Margaret Simons and Marybeth Timmermann announced their ambition of transforming and raising Beauvoir’s place in the canon. The series was to be a multi-pronged demonstration that Beauvoir, far from being simply a companion–follower of Sartre, as many still consider her, deserves recognition for a vast and variegated body of work that is original, coherent, and independent. The first and the two following volumes (Diary of a Philosophy Student, 2006; and Wartime Diary, 2008) contribute to that purpose, and so does the present collection of literary writings.

The variety of the texts included – a play, a piece of short fiction, teenage notes for a novel, lectures on the purpose and nature of literature, and actual literary criticism – is in itself a reminder that Beauvoir’s literary range, in both creation and commentary, is impressive. Except for the novel sketch, the texts are drawn from her most productive period (1940s to 1970s). They embrace the enthusiasms of her youth, with their forward-looking dynamic and willingness to experiment, as well as with the more circumspect and often retrospective approaches of her maturity.

The two major pieces of the anthology, the play The Useless Mouths and the novella Misunderstanding in Moscow, exemplify this tension. The 1944–45 play was Beauvoir’s only attempt at the genre. Disappointed when it flopped, she was particularly wounded by Genet’s scathing rejection of its non-theatricality on the first night. The title refers to ‘non-productive’ people designated by the authorities to be left to die in a besieged city where food has become too scarce to keep everyone alive. Set in medieval Flanders, The Useless Mouths is a moral tale about freedom and ethical responsibility, evocative of French life under the German Occupation. Unfortunately, as Catherine Léglu points out in her Introduction to the Bristol Classical Press edition of the French text (2001), even for its time, it was ‘anything but innovatory’, and, unlike Sartre’s The Flies (1943), which inspired it, the play is burdened with uni-dimensional characters and stiffly sententious dialogues. The text is, however, of interest as an indicator of Beauvoir’s philosophical and ethical positions: in particular the boldness with which she advocates the full enfranchisement of women (identified in the play as the largest group of ‘useless mouths’), highlights the dangerous tyrannies endemic in patriarchal society, and shows how circumstances of extreme constraint are more likely to produce difficult ambiguities rather than easily decided rights and wrongs. Léglu’s commentary and notes (in English) are better informed and better written than those provided in the anthology, and it is a pity that the translation, while accurate enough, actually intensifies the stiltedness of the original.

This is not at all the case with Misunderstanding in Moscow. Here the translator–presenter (Terry Keefe) draws us immediately into his excitement about the mystery of why Beauvoir, having intended to include this story in her collection La femme rompue (The Woman Destroyed, 1967), chose instead to cannibalise it into an inferior replacement, ‘L’âge de discrétion’ (‘The Age of Discretion’). Without solving the mystery, Keefe underscores the political and personal importance of this story for understanding Beauvoir’s opus, and the effectiveness of the literary technique that alternates the voices and viewpoints of the two retired French leftists who are the story’s protagonists. This is a richly layered work that captures the painful fragilities of human communication. On one level, it is an exquisitely anguished illustration of how a quarrel over a trivial misunderstanding can run so deep as to threaten even a long-established and seemingly unbreakable relationship. But with its post-Stalinist Moscow setting and Cold War resonances, it becomes almost Chekhovian: André has lost faith, and no longer believes that he will see his socialist ideals realised; Nicole, too, is tormented by self-doubt, and offers a wrenching self-portrait of a woman feeling and watching herself grow old. Despite occasional brusque narrative lurches that strain the links of verisimilitude, the feeling of entropic world-weariness is strongly sustained. There is one extraordinary, hallucinatory scene that works metonymically for the whole tale: a Russian church service in which a collective baptismal service is taking place in the presence of dead babies lined up in coffins. The poignant final reconciliation between André and Nicole does not abolish the shadow:

They had found each other again. He would ask questions and she would reply.
‘Why did you start feeling old?’ he asked.

Beauvoir’s reflections on other writers, on her own work, and on literature more generally constitute a significant part of the anthology, and reveal the cohesion of her commitment and the openness of her approach. In her appreciation of American writers such as Dos Passos and Faulkner, as in her promotion of Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde (1964), she shows herself to be a perceptive, sensitive, and passionate reader whose belief in the salutary power of the written word is utterly fundamental to her own identity and to her sense of belonging to humanity. Whether in the form of novels, autobiography, or essays, literature is for Beauvoir a mode of self-discovery and discovery of the other, the way in which the singularity of an individual existence can attain universality. But as she analyses her own itinerary, she discovers how much her personal adventure is intertwined with collective experience, what she calls ‘the hard pressure of history’. Her preface to Gisèle Freund’s photographs of Joyce’s Paris is a gem of recollection and evocation of the fervour and darkening turbulence of the 1930s in Europe. Texts such as ‘What can Literature Do?’ and ‘My Experience as a Writer’, offer invaluable insights into the socio-cultural crises that tore through France in the 1960s with the emergence of ahistorical structuralist theory.

Beauvoir the evangelist for existentialism, Beauvoir the polemicist defending the ‘metaphysical’ against the detachment of the Nouveau Roman, Beauvoir the patient and determined witness of her own life and of her times, Beauvoir the creator: the anthology contains examples of all these facets of a polyvalent but admirably consistent existence. The account of the recovery of a 1940s lecture – ‘Existentialist Theatre’ – recorded on 78 rpm discs in America and housed there in a university library, conjures up both the image of the writer at work and the sense of a still-living voice. And in what is perhaps the best piece of commentary in the volume, Meryl Altman turns her meditation on the fragmentary ‘Notes for a Novel’ (1926) into a brilliant scholarly analysis of the whole ongoing project of constructing the figure of Simone de Beauvoir: the collective quest that seeks to understand and evaluate her loves and aversions, the literary and philosophical influences that helped delineate her particular path, and, above all, the multiform body of work through which she engaged with the momentous human issues of a violent and transformative epoch.