The formation of a writer

Simone de Beauvoir’s Cahiers de jeunesse (1908–1986)

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader research project entitled Femmes de lettres, developed by the Brazil–France Research Group at IEA-USP, which focuses on the memorial writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), including her youth notebooks, correspondence, essays, and memoirs, as well as her role as an interlocutor of other authors who engaged in dialogue with her in their search for professionalization as writers. This article aims to analyze Beauvoir’s authorial construction since her first memorial writings, such as Cahiers de jeunesse (1926–1930), and examines the construction of Simone de Beauvoir’s system of thought and work based on the analysis of her youth notebooks. There are seven notebooks (the first of which was lost), written between 1926 and 1930 and published posthumously in book form in 2008, on the centenary of the author’s birth. This study is divided into four parts: 1) an introduction; 2) an analysis of passages from the notebooks in which the writer addresses authorial construction; 3) the interrelationship between the Cahiers de jeunesse and Beauvoir’s mature works; and, finally, 4) final considerations.