6 September, 2023
Luca Pinelli, University of Bergamo & Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
In feminist circles, the names of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir are almost invariably associated. Both thinkers are generally regarded to be the ‘mothers’ of second-wave feminisms in the Western world, their theories paving the way for those of subsequent feminist critics regardless of their agreement – or lack thereof – with their predecessors.
In 1965, during an interview with the Paris Review, Beauvoir stated in no uncertain terms how Woolf was ‘one of the woman writers who has interested me the most’.[1] Indeed, several times during the last period of her life, interviewers asked Beauvoir about Woolf in order to better understand what the French philosopher’s position was vis-à-vis her English predecessor.[2] Paradoxically, their obvious feminist connection, coupled with disciplinary and linguistic barriers has contributed to making their relationship somewhat underexplored in the existing scholarship: although several critics have emphasised the intersections and resonances between their works, a complete overview of Beauvoir’s reception of Woolf has not been provided yet.[3]
A closer look at their relationship reveals that Beauvoir started reading Woolf as the latter’s novels started being translated into French in 1929, a year after Woolf received the Prix Femina – Vie Heureuse in France for To the Lighthouse (1927). This important literary award convinced the French publisher Stock to acquire the rights for translating Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the same year, with other more overtly politicised texts like Orlando and A Room of One’s Own being initially considered to be too ‘English’ for a French readership – the latter national categorisation blatantly hiding a form of patriarchal bias in plain sight.[4] Thanks to the intercession of French cultural mediators like the painter and critic Jacques-Émile Blanche and the French quota of the Bloomsbury Group André Maurois, Orlando was published by Stock in 1931, while A Room would have to wait until 1951 to see a French translation. This first phase coincides with the discovery of (mostly) Anglo-American modernism by Beauvoir and her circle, who saw in the formal experimentation of authors like ‘Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, and some others’ an attempt to renounce the ‘false objectivity of the realist novel in order to deliver the world through subjectivities’.[5] This stage of reception may be located in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, although Beauvoir’s student diaries covering the years 1926 to 1930 frustratingly never mention Woolf or other modernist writers directly connected to her work as publisher. In this sense, Beauvoir’s later declaration in the second volume of her autobiography that she read ‘all of Woolf’ in those years seems to point to the years 1929 to 1931, but if she read Woolf before 1931, she never recorded it in her diary.[6]
Among the sources for her reading, Beauvoir cites the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Parisian bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres founded in 1915 by the French poet, writer, and publisher Adrienne Monnier, and Sylvia Beach’s famous bookshop Shakespeare & Company, with the two bookshops doubling as lending libraries.[7] Despite Beauvoir’s renewed membership in several months of 1932, 1936, 1937 and 1940, her Shakespeare & Co. reader’s card shows that she borrowed Woolf’s The Years (1937) on 12 April 1937 but gave it back on the next day, which suggests that perhaps she did not like it much considering that she kept all the other books for more than one day and that she never references that novel in her writing or in her interviews.[8] In the Paris Review interview, Beauvoir says she has read: Orlando, which she never mentions elsewhere; Mrs Dalloway, which she quotes several times in The Second Sex in the first French translation by Simone David; The Waves, which she admits in this interview she ‘[doesn’t] care much for’ (one may wonder whether she meant The Years here, as The Waves is mentioned several times in The Second Sex); Flush, which she says she is very ‘fond of’ but never mentions elsewhere; Woolf’s diary, which she says is ‘fascinating’ but ‘foreign’ to her because Woolf is ‘too concerned with whether she’ll be published, with what people will think of her’; and, finally, A Room of One’s Own, whose argument about Judith Shakespeare she paraphrased in The Second Sex but could not quote directly as the first French translation, by Clara Malraux, would only come out in 1951, two years after Gallimard published Le Deuxième Sexe. [9]
While Beauvoir was not the first person to write about A Room in French – Woolf’s essay was also included in the list of set texts for the women’s secondary-teaching exam Agrégation de l’enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles in 1930, with other articles on A Room appearing in French periodicals between 1930 and 1935 – Beauvoir seems to be one of the first French intellectuals to engage with the English text in a more overtly feminist way in a philosophical essay. In crucial years described as belonging to the ‘trough of the waves’ of feminism by Sylvie Chaperon[10], Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe and Woolf’s Une Chambre à soi contributed to paving the way for the new wave of feminist movements in France, prompting women to rethink their lives under patriarchy and to find novel ways of saying ‘we’.
In the 1950s, the two texts continued to circulate in France and abroad: besides A Room being published in French in 1951, the first English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe by zoologist H.M. Parshley came out in 1953. This text would become infamous in the subsequent decades because of the heavy-handed editing, possibly dictated (at least partly) by the U.S. publisher Alfred Knopf, as well as because of the translator’s poor understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary.[11] In the same year,, Leonard Woolf published a selection of Woolf’s diaries for the first time, a text titled A Writer’s Diary (1953) which would come out in Germaine Beaumont’s French translation in April 1958 for the Éditions du Rocher. Beauvoir started reading it in the following months, as her unpublished diaries reveal: on the 25 May 1958, as she was revising her first volume of autobiography for publication, Beauvoir referred to reading Woolf’s diary using the present tense (‘Quand je lis le Journal de Virginia Woolf, je suis passionnée’; ‘When I read Virginia Woolf’s Diary I’m excited’), and in a later diary entry dated March 1961 she writes ‘Est-ce fuite, paresse d’entreprendre le livre qu’il faudra bien écrire quand j’aurai fini de parler de moi ? ou la suite d’inspiration que j’ai eue en 58, après avoir lu le journal de V. Woolf ?’ (‘Is this a flight, is this an unwillingness to start the book that I will have to write once I’m done speaking about myself? or is it the rest of the inspiration I had in 1958 after I read V. Woolf’s diary?’), thereby confirming that her own autobiographical project was partly inspired by – or at any rate in dialogue with – Woolf’s life-writing.[12] Thus, 1958 marked the year in which Beauvoir read Leonard Woolf’s selection of Woolf’s diaries, freshly translated into French, as well as the year in which, a few months later, on 6 October, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) was published by Gallimard in the Blanche series.
This research helps us to question Beauvoir’s public statements, as in the Paris Review interview she confidently declared that she had read Woolf in the original English, but the existing evidence seems to suggest instead that, as is to be expected, she was very much attuned to the French literary marketplace despite her membership of Shakespeare & Co.: the only texts by Woolf we know she read in the original are A Room and The Years, if indeed she actually started reading the latter novel before returning it on the next day. Moreover, in the same interview she seems to have come to disparage A Writer’s Diary even though it seemed to inspire part of her autobiographical project between 1958 and 1961. While Woolf and Beauvoir are generally associated only on the grounds of their influence on subsequent feminist theory, this cursory look at Beauvoir’s first response to Woolf’s work has shown how the English author was an important writer in many other respects, one whose presence on the French literary marketplace from the late 1920s onwards was very much in dialogue with Beauvoir’s sense of herself as a woman writer, as a feminist, and as a practitioner of life-writing. These three aspects of their connection, it seems safe to argue, should not be separated.
Image credit: Vanessa Bell, ‘Interior with a Table’, oil on canvas, 1921. Public domain.
Source
[1] Madeleine Gobeil, ‘Simone de Beauvoir. An Interview’, trans. from the French by Bernard Frechtman, The Paris Review, 34 (1965), Spring-Summer, 23-40.
[2] See for instance the 1979 interview with Margaret A. Simons in Margaret A. Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham-Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 11-12.
[3] Helen Southworth and Pierre-Éric Villeneuve have already pointed to part of this reception, respectively in The Second Sex and in Beauvoir’s references to Woolf in her Japanese lectures in the 1960s. Cf. Helen Southworth, The Intersecting Realities and Fictions of Virginia Woolf and Colette (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004), 126-7, 130-1; Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, “Virginia Woolf among Writers and Critics: The French Intellectual Scene”, in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, ed. by Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 20-38.
[4] See Laura Marcus, ‘The European Dimensions of the Hogarth Press’, in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, pp. 328-56 (p. 331).
[5] Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 240-1. The translation is my own.
[6] La Force de l’âge, p. 69. In her posthumously published Cahiers de jeunesse (2008), Beauvoir never mentions Woolf but does mention two authors indirectly connected to Woolf, namely Katherine Mansfield and Hope Mirrlees. Among the most important modernist texts the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press published was the experimental Paris: A Poem (1920) by Mirrlees and Mansfield’s short story “Prelude” (1918). Frustratingly, Beauvoir does mention both authors in her student diaries but not these works: instead, she references Mirrlees’s The Counterplot (1924, trans. 1929) and Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories (1920, trans. 1928), both in French translation. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Cahiers de jeunesse. 1926-1930 (Paris : Gallimard, 2008), 846, 656, 672.
[7] Cf. La Force de l’âge, p. 69.
[8] ‘Simone de Beauvoir. 1937-1940’, Shakespeare and Company Project, version 1.5.6. Centre for Digital Humanities, Princeton University, 2021. URL: <https://shakespeareandco.princeton.edu/members/beauvoir-simone-de/cards/8fe6f441-b5e8-4bca-b3a3-d2c006ae3bed/>. Accessed 02 August 2023.
[9] ‘Simone de Beauvoir. An Interview’, p. 25.
[10] Sylvie Chaperon, Les Années Beauvoir (1945-1970) (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. XIII. The original French is ‘dans le creux de la vague’ and the translation is my own.
[11] For a better sense of this long history of (mis)translation and the subsequent feminist backlash by Beauvoir scholars, cf. On ne naît pas femme : on le devient. The Life of a Sentence, ed. by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a recent reappraisal of Parshley’s role in the translation, see also Yolanda Patterson, ‘H. M. Parshley et son combat contre l’amputation de la version américaine’, in Cinquantenaire du Deuxième Sexe, ed. by Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, with the collaboration of Kate and Edward Fullbrook (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2002), pp. 475-81; and Anna Bogic, ‘The Story of the First English Translation of Beauvoir’s “Le Deuxième Sexe” And Why It Still Matters’, Simone de Beauvoir Studies 26, pp. 81-96.
[12] I thank Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir for giving me access to the Woolf occurrences in Beauvoir’s unpublished diaries.
The Modernist Review 