A novel by Simone de Beauvoir, deemed “too intimate” to be published during her lifetime, will be released next year.
Written three quarters of a century ago, Les inséparables, examines the author’s friendship with Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died at the age of 21. Written in 1954, five years after the publication of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the novel follows the “passionate and tragic” friendship she had with Zaza before her death.
2 Seas, the agency responsible for the publication of the novel, deemed it “too intimate” to be published during the author’s lifetime. However, the manuscript was recently rediscovered by de Beauvoir’s daughter Sylvie, who consented to its publication, and has written the preface for it.
The novel will be available to UK readers late next year, and has been referred to by Charlotte Knight, the senior editor of Vintage, as “a moving, gripping coming-of-age novel about female friendship and finding one’s own way in the world.”
According to the publisher, the story revolves around "the friendship between two young women struggling against conventional ideas of what a woman should be in early 20th-century Paris: chaste, devout, obedient and obliged from a young age to set aside her own interests and passions.”
De Beauvoir referred to the novel in her memoir, Force of Circumstance, in which she writes of her partner, Jean-Paul Sartre, who “held his nose” when he first read it.
Her daughter, who is de Beauvoir’s literary executor, said that she first read the manuscript in 1986, she intended to publish it then, but that “other publishing priorities simply got in the way, which is why I’m just getting to her novels and short stories now”.
Les inséparables will be published this October in French and will be released in English in 2021.
