Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir created a remarkable portrait of a twentieth-century woman’s struggle for independence.

In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she describes her early life, from her birth in Paris, 1908, to her student days at Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sarte – ‘the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen’. Full of the most intimate detail and a true sense of discovery, it is a revealing account of her early development as a writer through her initial acceptance and then courageous defiance of the social conventions of her bourgeois family and class. An inspirational and often controversial figure, Simone de Beauvoir remains a powerful icon of early feminism.