The Image of Her

Simone de Beauvoir

£14.99

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Vintage Publishing
1 May 2025
ISBN: 9781784879907
Hardback
208 pages

From the publisher

TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN

A compelling novel about the requirement to be perfect, without losing sight of yourself - by the greatest feminist of the twentieth-century, Simone de Beauvoir.

She’s living a perfect life – so why does Laurence feel so torn?

Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office.

All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth.

Slim but powerful, this is a classic story of womanhood and its oppressors, parents and their children, and the quest for personal truth – by the iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

Praise for The Inseparables:

‘Passionate and tragic’ Vanity Fair

‘A ravishing work of art’ Financial Times

‘Slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls – and the pressures that sunder them’ Spectator

‘In Lauren Elkin's fine translation, the lucid, sculpted prose can flare into starbursts of introspective sensuality... Beauvoir could write like a dutiful daughter of the French classics’ The Times