Simone de Beauvoir's 'too intimate' novel to be published after 75 years

Les Inséparables, which depicts the writer’s passionate friendship with a girl who later died, was withheld during her lifetime

A novel by Simone de Beauvoir that was deemed too intimate to release in her lifetime will be published for the first time later this year.

The French writer and feminist’s Les inséparables tells the story of the “passionate and tragic” friendship she had as a young girl with Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died of encephalitis at the age of 21. Written in 1954, in the first person, the novel sees the author of feminist classic The Second Sex, published five years earlier, tell the story of the beginning of the friendship, as Andrée, or Zaza, joins the same class as Sylvie, or Simone.

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