Daughters of de Beauvoir - ACE182.3

The Ecole Normale Supérieure, where de Beauvoir met Sartre. Photographs. Her words on how Sartre always tried to accept her on her own terms and not according to his. Hélène de Beauvoir, Sister of Simone, says that de Beauvoir claimed not to feel threatened by Sartre’s other relationships if she liked the other woman. The farmhouse in Alsace where Hélène lived with her husband; Hélène painting; de Beauvoir’s description of her sister’s work, "…a delicate balance between formal invention and allusion to reality" over. Hélène talks about her relationship with her sister, about their parents, and about neither of them having children. Original film of Marseilles. De Beauvoir’s description of taking a job there, and not considering marrying Sartre even though this might have led to a double posting. Jenny Turner, Writer, says she decided to study philosophy because she knew de Beauvoir had done so. She bemoans the lack of "public life", cafés, etc., and talks about de Beauvoir and Sartre visiting Edinburgh and finding it impossible to get a cup of tea. Turner talks about The Force of Circumstance (La Force des choses, 1963), and "being completely grabbed by the sense of history being lived through". She reads from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, 1958) de Beauvoir’s description of refusing to eat certain foods – Turner talks about this "linking of ideas with feeling". Paris street scenes, Sartre at a café; German troops, etc.; de Beauvoir’s descriptions of life just after the Munich Crisis and of the Occupation. Marta Zabaleta Hinrichsen, Political Refugee, describes being given a copy of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by her mother. Photographs of Hinrichsen and her family. She talks about writing to de Beauvoir because she disagreed with something from the second volume of autobiography, and receiving a positive reply. Photographs of Hinrichsen as a student in Chile; she describes events of the coup, and wanting to physically distance herself from these "subversive" books; she was comforted by the thought that de Beauvoir cared about people in such situations and would have helped if she could.