Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

I know is a paperback, but it is the sort of print that stains your fingers. Sent back.

I really like this book and feels like a good translation. Reason I am giving it 4 stars is that the edition is hard to read, words are too small and bblotchy it would be totally worth it to have it edited in better paper and font.

great book ….as is second sex part 1…..and final ch….beauvoir (and we all have human contradictions) is one of the best thinkers and certainly one of the 2 or 3 most important of the last or even this centyury

One marvellous book by a woman who was unafraid to live and had a lot of important ideas to share.

Happy with product!

I think this is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. It covers the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir's life from birth to her graduation from university and the beginning of her relationship with Jean-Paule Sartre, and shows, in detailed, beautifully clear prose, how De Beauvoir gradually changed from dutiful bourgeois Catholic daughter to intellectual rebel and one of the leading thinkers of her generation. De Beauvoir's portraits of her family - her handsome and charismatic but unreliable father, gentle, deeply Catholic mother, arts-loving sister and host of cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles - are vivid and remarkably free from the rancour that usually permeates the autobiographies of children who rebel against their parents' authority. In fact, De Beauvoir remains impressively sympathetic towards her mother even though they had some very difficult periods, and ended up living very different lives. The descriptions of De Beauvoir's reading over the years, the books that helped her and how she found herself able to escape from some of the nastier bits of her life through literature, are wonderful, and will probably have any book-lover heading to the library. I found it particularly impressive that De Beauvoir didn't set out to make herself appear particularly brilliant or wonderful, but could actually be wryly funny about herself, particularly about her lofty attitude to poverty (she was disabused abruptly by fellow-student Simone Weil) and her silly adolescent adventures roaming the bars of Paris.Most moving of all are De Beauvoir's descriptions of the two important friendships she made during her adolescence - with her cousin Jacques (who she briefly hoped to marry) and with Elisabeth Mabille (re-named 'Zaza' in this memoir) who was her best friend from school through to Zaza's premature death. Zaza's story - of an intelligent, vibrant woman crushed by a repressive upper-middle-class family, whose dying words were 'there are outcasts in every family. I'm the outcast in ours' - is both unbearably poignant and addictively readable, while Jacques's rakish career is like something out of a particularly good novel. There are a host of other friends warmly depicted too, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty (renamed 'Jean Pradelle), Beauvoir's fun-loving Polish friend Stépha, the melancholy Lisa Quermadec and of course Sartre and his entourage, who memorably arrive in the autobiography in the final section.I'd recommend this to anyone as an example not only of great storytelling but of beautiful, clear writing style. (This comes across even clearer in the original French - I interpret my doing well in French A'Level to having read De Beauvoir in the months before taking my exams!) A wonderful book - and I think on balance the best volume in this four-volume autobiography.

I appreciate it seems slightly odd writing a book review very many years after a book was written. Still, given the paucity of reviews of this exceptional mid twentieth century memoir of an intellectual, much of it certainly based on de Beauvoir’s earlier diaries, I think it is worth encouraging more people to read it. I enjoyed Simone de Beauvoir’s novels many years ago but never looked at her memoirs till now. I picked up ‘Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter’ some time ago in a second hand bookshop. Perhaps it was because I had recently read John Carey’s ‘the Unexpected Professor’ that I turned to it. The books are very different because people’s lives are very different but also because Carey’s covers almost the whole of his life to date whereas de Beauvoir’s is only about the young woman. Also, de Beauvoir’s is intensely personal. She was not afraid to depict herself as an intense (some might say neurotic) young girl, who had very grand ideas about her future (in a strictly non-materialistic sense) but turned from self examination to concern for the lives of others, although she retained her individualist philosophy. Both Carey’s and de Beauvoirs memoirs are highly accessible. You don’t need to be – or see yourself – as an intellectual, still less a philosopher, to enjoy this book.Both Carey and de Beauvoir are also united by their self-discipline. Nothing is gained without hard work (and when it came to hard work, de Beauvoir took that to extremes, the way she did with other aspects of her life). Other reviewers – and indeed de Beauvoir herself – have referred to her early happy childhood but in fact there were times during the (First World) war when she had very little to eat, her clothes were threadbare and she and her family moved from a pleasant apartment in Montparnasse to a smaller, cramped place with no bathroom.The memoir focuses not just on de Beauvoir and her parents, particularly as the young woman is maturing in her early twenties, but on her sister, her friends and the host of people she met at university and elsewhere. Determined to ‘live life to the full’ she (amusingly) recounts trips to ‘dens of iniquity’ (without ever indulging in iniquity herself). Painfully aware of her conventional upbringing, at a time when France was Catholic and young bourgeois women were expected to aspire to marry well, rather than have a career, Simone was determined to be very different. She risked ridicule by declaring to her parents and closest friends that she had lost her faith. In her early twenties she had (platonic) relationships with several men, including a married man, although intellectually she favoured ‘free love’ she knew, at least in her early twenties, that was, at least for her, an impossibility. We meet Sartre in the memoir only towards the very end. Simone notes how, very early on in their friendship, he declared he would never marry. Marriage was, for them and the other young intellectuals with whom they surrounded themselves, a route to conventional living – to be avoided at all costs. Simone spends much of her time worrying that her friend Zaza will be forced into marriage by her strict Catholic mother.I’m going to read the next book in Simone’s memoirs, of course: ‘The Prime of Life’ and, needless to say, am very much looking forward to it.

I first encountered this at school, but that was some 25 years ago and I was dissuaded by a teacher from finishing it when she claimed that the concepts would be too adult for me. As I was only 14, she was probably right; although I found it very readable then, in a 'grown up school story' kind of way, I am getting much more from it now.I'm not well versed in the thinking of de Beauvoir, and not sure I'd agree with many of her opinions (her pro-abortion views horrified me) but this book made me consider deeply the reasons why middle-class people become socialists, and made me also think about the shackles which bound many intelligent women in the early years of the last century....Far from being deeply intellectual in its approach, this book is very readable, and made me want to find out more about de Beauvoir's life and work.