Winegarten, Renee. Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical View. New York: Berg, 1988.

From a review:

The subtitle of this study gives fair warning of the demystifing spirit in which Simone de Beauvoir’s biography is to be approached in this text. It is therefore not surprising to read in the first chapter the author’s declaration that she will not be seeing Beauvoir as ‘the surrogate mother-figure, cherished by those individuals in quest of feminine identity’, or as ‘the idol of the utopian revolutionary left’. Instead, Renee Winegarten will probe ‘the mystifications of an all-too-common modern form of rationalism which leads its adherents to see only what they wish to see, where change and revolution are at stake’, and of which Beauvoir’s life and writing are taken to be a prime example.

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