Letters to Sartre

These intimate love letters reveal the open relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre, two of the twentieth century's groundbreaking thinkers.

Simone de Beauvoir lived her feminist philosophy. She never married or had children, she had affairs with both men and women, and she actively defied the norms for women of her era. At the same time, she conducted an intense, long-term relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she referred to as her husband.

De Beauvoir and Sartre met as philosophy students in Paris in 1929. For over fifty years, until their deaths in the 1980s, the couple had a close open relationship. This book contains her letters to him, revealing the details of her everyday life and her passion for the man who shared her ideals. It is an intimate portrait of a woman living in an adventurous, complicated way in the name of individual freedom.

'For 51 years, the conversations between them created ideas, books, and a bond which other passions enraged or enriched, but never altogether ruptured. It was, for De Beauvoir, an experiment in loving' Guardian

'An opportunity to hear a vigorous and innovative thinker...speaking in her abrasive, touching, breathtakingly candid private voice' Sunday Times

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY QUINTIN HOARE