Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
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First published in France in 1958 as Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, tracing her childhood and youth in bourgeois Paris through to her early twenties. Raised in a devout Catholic household, Beauvoir recounts her growing unease with the conventions of her family and class, her gradual loss of religious faith, and her determination to make a life of her own through philosophy and literature. Along the way, she evokes her intense friendship with Élisabeth Lacoin, known as Zaza, her years of study at the Sorbonne, and her first encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre. What begins as a portrait of a privileged upbringing becomes an account of intellectual awakening and the difficult pursuit of independence.
With the clarity of hindsight and the attentiveness of a novelist, Beauvoir examines how a self is formed under the pressures of family, education, gender and social expectation. Her recollections are both intimate and analytical, revealing the origins of the questions about freedom and circumstance that would shape her philosophical work. The opening instalment of a remarkable autobiographical sequence, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers a vivid portrait of a young woman discovering the terms on which she intends to live.
From the book
“I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
On Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
“It is a stimulating story of the birth of an existentialist and the coming of age of an extraordinary young woman.”
— Kirkus Reviews