Words At Large

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Everyman's Library) dramatically revised the way women talk and think about themselves. The book, published in France in 1949, is a detailed analysis of women's oppression and has become a classic manifesto of the liberated woman.

Now Writers & Company takes a special look at the celebrated French author and philosopher, 100 years after her birth. In the show, host Eleanor Wachtel speaks first with documentary filmmaker Madeleine Gobeil.

In the mid-1960s, Gobeil made a documentary film about the celebrated author and philospher with filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, one of Beauvoir’s lovers. Gobeil also interviewed Beauvoir for the Paris Review.

This section of the show includes a short clip of Beauvoir, taken from a 1959 television interview with Radio-Canada, talking about the moral foundation of her own existentialist beliefs.

Then Wachtel invited three Beauvoir enthuasiasts to discuss the life and work of this extraordinary woman.

Nancy K. Miller is a professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, specializing in French literature and feminism. She lived in Paris in the 1960s and is writing a memoir about that period called Out of Breath. Her books include But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives (Columbia University Press), Bequest and Betrayal (Indiana University Press) and Getting Personal (Routledge).

Toril Moi grew up in Norway. She taught in Norway and at Oxford, and is now at Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her own book on the author is Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford University Press).

Hazel Rowley, who was brought up in England and Australia, now lives in New York City. She moved to Paris for 18 months to write her 2005 book, Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (HarperCollins). The book has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has garnered international acclaim.

Miller and Rowley were in the CBC’s New York studio, and Moi joined the conversation from Chapel Hill. They discuss their first experience reading Beauvoir, her relationship with Sartre, and her traditional upbringing and controversial lifestyle. They also read from some of their favourite passages of the author’s work.

First aired January 27, 2008 on Writers & Company. [runs 51:53]

On Writers & Company on September 4, listen to a rebroadcast of Eleanor Wachtel's 1997 conversation with award-winning author Margaret Forster. She has written many successful and acclaimed novels including Keeping the World Away and, most recently, Over (Vintage).