To discuss The Image of Her (1966) by Simone de Beauvoir we are joined by writer and translator Lauren Elkin, whose previous books include Flâneuse: Women Walk the City; Scaffolding and Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Beauvoir was also a prolific novelist.

In The Image of Her—newly translated by Elkin after more than forty years— reads like a dispatch from the smooth surface of a life coming quietly undone. Laurence is a successful advertising executive with a picture-perfect Parisian existence—handsome husband, lover, chic flat, weekends in the country—but when her daughter starts asking difficult questions about injustice, that surface begins to crack. We trace the novel’s shifting reception—from period piece to prescient critique—and consider Beauvoir’s voice as a novelist: ironic, exacting, unexpectedly funny.

Books mentioned
Simone de Beauvoir - The Image of Her; The Second Sex; The Inseparables; A Very Easy Death
Lauren Elkin - Flâneuse: Women Walk the City; Scaffolding; Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art; No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute