Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a woman and a city soon to fall."

Simone de Beauvoir is best known for her autobiographical writings, as well as her study of the subordination of women in Western society, Le Deuxi me Sexe (1949). Written five years before, her powerful play Les Bouches Inutiles (1945) shows Beauvoir's dramatisation of issues to which the later texts would return, as well as a significant stage in her creative and philosophical dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre.

In 1983 de Beauvoir published Sartre's letters, and when asked about her own letters to him, she replied that they had been lost. But after her death, her literary executor and adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon Beauvoir, stumbled upon a parcel of faded letters addressed to Monsieur Sartre.

A major book in the history of feminism, which, when it was first published in the 1950s, was considered a radical thesis. But its claim that the subordination of women is not a fact of nature but a product of social conditioning is now widely accepted.

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre - 'the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen'.

A Harper Perennial Modern Classics reissue of this unflinching examination of post-war French intellectual life, and an amazing chronicle of love, philosophy and politics from one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century.

Written as an act of revenge against the 17 year-old who came between her and Jean-Paul Sartre, She Came to Stay is Simone de Beauvoir's first novel - a lacerating study of a young, naive couple in love and the usurping woman who comes between them.

First published in 1967, this book consists of three short novellas on the theme of women's vulnerability - in the first, to the process of ageing, in the second to loneliness, and, in the third, to the growing indifference of a loved one.

First published in 1949, 'The Second Sex' is a landmark in the history of feminism. In this new translation to mark the 60th anniversary of publication, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have produced the first integral translation, reinstating a third of the original work.