Seventy Letters: some hitherto untranslated texts from published and unpublished sources

by Simone Weil, Richard Rhees (Translator)

"These letters, written before and during the Second World War, have with one exception not been translated before, and the originals have been published dispersedly or not at all. Though inevitably incomplete, this book is offered as a substantial sample of Simone Weil's correspondence, throwing new light on her life, personality, and thought. It includes a long correspondence with an industrialist arising out of her own experiences as a factory worker, as well as reflections on politics, art, philosophy, mathematics, and religion, some descriptions of travel in Italy, and her last letters to her parents from London, where she strenuously shared the life of war-time England until her premature death, hastened by voluntary malnutrition, in 1943.

Her letters and other writings show the remarkable quality of her mind, and this volume and her Essays (1962) show Sir Richard Ree's skill as editor and translator."

Genres: Philosophy

207 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

Reviews

[Angus Clangus]

She was insanely cool. Then she was just insane.
The lack of decent notes hurts this book, as does any real letter dealing in depth with her religious conversion.