Simone de Beauvoir has been described as ‘the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century’. The range of her contribution to twentieth-century cultural capital is certainly impressive: Goncourt prize winner and author of seven fictional works; a key theorist within French existentialism; author of Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), which is arguably the most pioneering feminist text of the century; a significant figure in twentieth-century French auto-biography; an important travel writer and contributor to the French epistolary tradition; a thinker and political activist, who addressed contentious issues such as the brutality of the French army during the Algerian War, attitudes to ageing and women's right to contraception and abortion within a patriarchal society.

Such an extensive contribution to twentieth-century culture has been the focus of a vast amount of critical and popular attention. In particular, since Beauvoir's death in 1986, the publication of the Lettres à Sartre and Journal de guerre in 1990 and recently, of her letters to Nelson Algren, critical interest in her oeuvre has assumed a renewed impetus. These events have encouraged re-evaluations of her work, particularly in Britain and the United States. This has mainly taken the form of a re-assessment of Beauvoir's status as a philosopher, involving a recognition of her contribution to existential phenomenology and an increased awareness of the ethical concerns in her writing – a development itself resulting perhaps from a ‘fin de siècle’ and millennium anxiety to evaluate the significance of intellectual and philosophical traditions, an increased awareness of women's contribution to the production of philosophy and a related criticism of the assumptions of white, Western, patriarchal intellectual traditions and systems of thought.