Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker

by Simone Weil, Eric O. Springsted (Foreword), Richard Rees (Translator)

Introducing the Selected Works of Simone Weil

Genres: Philosophy

228 pages, Paperback

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.