Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Beauvoir wrote Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée between 1956 and 1958 and Gallimard published it in Paris in November 1958. It was the first of four memoir volumes — followed by The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972) — that together form the longest single autobiography by a French twentieth-century writer. James Kirkup's English translation appeared from World Publishing in Cleveland in 1959 and from André Deutsch in London the same year.

The four-part structure of the book (childhood, adolescence, university, and the last year of Zaza's life) is written as a shaped argument rather than an unedited diary. Beauvoir is fifty years old when she writes it, twenty-nine years after Zaza's death and nine years after The Second Sex. She reads the girl she was as material for the argument the older book made — the pressure a Catholic bourgeois household put on a clever daughter, and the specific damage that pressure did.

The book's other project is the vindication of Zaza. Élisabeth Lacoin (whom Beauvoir calls Zaza throughout the memoir) was Beauvoir's best friend from the age of nine, an equally serious student, and the daughter of a devout family whose refusal of her engagement to the young philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty is, in Beauvoir's account, what killed her. The memoir does not conceal that Zaza's death gave Beauvoir the freedom of the writer she became. The last sentence names the debt.

Part I opens on the day of Beauvoir's birth — 9 January 1908 — in an apartment at 103 boulevard du Montparnasse, one floor above the café La Rotonde. Her father Georges de Beauvoir is a bourgeois lawyer with monarchist politics and a fading law practice; her mother Françoise (born Brasseur, from Verdun) is a devout Catholic educated at a convent. Her younger sister Hélène — called Poupette in the family — arrives two years later. The book's first hundred pages are a portrait of the household: the rented apartments, the summer visits to the grandfather's estate at Meyrignac in the Limousin, the Cours Désir Catholic girls' school where Beauvoir starts winning prizes at six, and the arrival of Élisabeth 'Zaza' Lacoin — the equally serious daughter of a large, wealthy, devout family — in the same classroom in 1917.

Part II covers the family's decline (the First World War, the collapse of Georges's income, the move to a smaller apartment on the rue de Rennes, the shift from a household with servants to one without), Beauvoir's education at the Cours Désir through her baccalauréat, and the two internal ruptures that define her adolescence: the loss of religious faith at fourteen (a summer day at Meyrignac, walking to the kitchen for a snack, realising she no longer believes) and the corresponding conflict with her parents about whether a daughter could be a working woman rather than a wife. Zaza is beside her through all of this and coming under the parallel pressure of her own family, whose expectations for a Catholic upper-bourgeois daughter were more precise and more brutally enforced.

Part III is the Sorbonne. Beauvoir passes her baccalauréat in 1924 and enrols in mathematics and literature at the Institut Catholique before transferring to the Sorbonne to read philosophy. She takes her licence in 1927, and in 1928 begins preparing for the agrégation — the state examination that qualified philosophy teachers. That preparation put her, at twenty-one, into a very small circle of philosophy students that included the future philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the future ethnographer and philosopher Paul Nizan, and — arriving late in the spring of 1929 — a short unattractive young man from La Rochelle named Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir finishes second in the country in the agrégation. Sartre finishes first. She is the youngest person of either sex ever to pass it.