Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27

The Beauvoir Series

by Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Klaw (Editor), Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Editor)

Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works.Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Diary

392 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 10, 2006

About the author

Works of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include The Second Sex in 1949 and The Coming of Age , a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.


Simone de Beauvoir, an author and philosopher, wrote novels, monographs, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. People now best know She Came to Stay and The Mandarins , her metaphysical novels. Her treatise, a foundational contemporary tract, of 1949 detailed analysis of oppression of women.

Reviews

[Emily Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly felt like reading my own journals from when I was 18, 19, but infinitely more discerning and eloquent!

So incredibly nineteen, the way she spends pages writing about her joy (“I love myself passionately…I am happy to be what I am”) and then the next day’s entry begins “I am face to face with my awfully destitute self!” Also the way it’s full of promises to her self, resolutions to study more, read more widely, be kinder to her sister, get over Jacques, love Jacques again, get over him again….

Loved how she quoted her favourite authors in her entries and returned to the same lines, over and over again—Rivière’s “everything that happens to me is so important!” and Goethe’s “I love you. Does that concern you?” and Mauriac’s “Am I loved? Do I love?” So often the lines have started to live in me too. Loved also the 3 pages of Rilke quotes she wrote down after finishing Notebooks —“I would like to copy every page of this book by Rilke!” Same.

Very interesting to see the beginnings of her philosophy taking shape (before she even met Sartre!)—emphasis on inner life and feeling, the role of woman, purpose of marriage, contrast between self and Other.

And also this: an entry in May 1927 where she writes “I myself keep my emptiness inside of me, and this certainty that I am alone, that nothing can satisfy me, that my happiness will have to be willed so strongly, so severely that it will be more of a fatigue than a peace.” And then in the margins next to it she later adds “May 1929. Thank you, my nineteen-year-old sister, for having willed it so strongly that today, without anyone's help, it seems to me to be an unexpected gift."

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“Above all, apply myself to feeling. (Easy!)”

“I am astounded that everyone is not like me. And I suffer from it.”

“O my self, I will be sincere, sincere to you, completely sincere.”

“Become attached to inner life, take it seriously and sacrifice everything for it.”

“I am not looking for anything. I have my strength within me. I love and keep myself. Oh! My strength that does not impede a great tenderness!”

[prashant · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh to have her brain

[aly flowers · Rating 4 out of 5]

she was also just a girl

[Klley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I presently think that it suffices to live well " is a kinda thing she says. i like talking like that. simone is really smart navigating through her various crisis too.

[Leigh Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite in the collection.