The publication of feminist masterwork The Second Sex was a scandal as much as a worldwide success. Simone de Beauvoir’s response to Jean-Paul Sartre when he remarked that she had become a feminist while writing the book, was that she became a feminist once the book existed for other women.
Decades later, after being banned by the Vatican, igniting the beginning of Second-Wave Feminism across the US and Europe, and inspiring further legendary works like Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, the 1949 manuscript was thought lost.
Now, reproduced for the very first time, from SP books comes the final manuscript of the ground-breaking masterpiece, in Simone de Beauvoir’s own hand. The manuscript comprises drafts, fragments, and corrected typescripts that were gathered and are now preserved at the BNF (French National Library). Together they constitute the first volume of The Second Sex, published in 1949 – Facts and Myths. In her foreword, Simone de Beauvoir’s adoptive daughter Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir remarks, “How moving, this opportunity for direct contact with the manuscript! It feels like a living skin, with its shivers, its confessions, its withdrawals; its cross-outs, deletions, repentances, overwriting, and even sometimes daydream scribbles…” The hand-assembled large-format edition is printed on thick, luxury paper fabricated on demand in Italy, covered in a textured paper that resembles fabric, and presented in a deluxe, gilded slipcase. Paired with an afterword by award-winning French novelist Leïla Slimani, Le Deuxième Sexe: The Original Manuscript (June 2018), is a gorgeously presented keepsake, and an unprecedented glimpse into the making of a masterwork and the founding of one of the most powerful feminist movements in history. Simone de Beauvoir’s original Le Deuxième Sexe is not to be missed.
SP Books is an independent and acclaimed publishing house specializing in the publication of limited facsimile editions of manuscripts from some of history’s most renowned authors such as Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Jean Cocteau, and Charles Baudelaire. In 2016, SP Books launched in the UK with the “fair copy” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre held in the British Library, while last year saw the release of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In 2018, they released Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein and W.A. Mozart’s last musical diary, entitled Verzeichnüss aller meiner Werke, or Catalogue of My Works. SP Books has brought several of its limited editions to the U.S., beginning with Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby in 2017, and will follow this year with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.