Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee.
Inscribed To Her Friend And Publisher
De Beauvoir, Simone. Memoires d’une Jeaune Fille Rangee. Paris: Gallimard, [1958].
8vo.; black, white and red printed self-wrappers; protective tissue still present; a pristine copy. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of Beauvoir’s critically acclaimed first memoir. Inscribed on the first blank: [Ct?] Bill Targ, avec tarte [?] ma sympathie S de Beauvoir. Text entirely in French; English translation is Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Many Beauvoir scholars consider this her second-greatest work, followed only by the landmark The Second Sex. Certainly Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter influenced an entire feminist generation of readers who related to her frank, awkward, angry and poignant recounting of a young girl coming into womanhood in a rigid society.
Upon its publication Memoirs was hailed as a tightly-written elegy to lost girlhood that was brilliant in form as well as in content.
In its own way, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter became as influential a work as The Second Sex. It is the most moving and also the most literary of her autobiographical writings. Her prose is controlled, yet passionate, as she evokes situation and event from her birth to [close friend Elizabeth Le Coin] Zaza’s death. When it was published, women all over France wrote to her, astonished at how she had mirrored their lives and captured the sense of their daily existence. Even classmates from the Cours Desir who had been outraged by The Second Sex wrote to tell her that they forgave her and to ask, “Then what happened to you?” (Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. By Deirdre Bair, New York: Summit Books, [1990], p. 468)
William Targ was a friend and publisher of Beauvoir as well as an amateur collector of her work. He is noted in Bair’s Beauvoir biography for obsessively keeping de Beauvoirs’s early jottings, her notes, and even discarded drafts of manuscripts (ibid., p. 626). Although Beauvoir would go on to write three other supplemental memoirs (La Force de l’Age [The Prime of Life], 1960; La Force des choses [Force of Circumstance], 1963; and Toute compte fait [All Said and Done], 1972), Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter would always be considered her autobiograpical masterpiece.
First edition copies, in French, in pristine condition, of Beauvoir’s masterful autobiographical work are uncommon; presention copies are nearly unheard of.
(#4198)
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