The Image of Her

By Simone de Beauvoir

Book Overview

Simone de Beauvoir's gripping classic of a woman striving for perfection

Laurence lives what appears to be an ideal existence. Her life features the trappings of 1960s Parisian bourgeoisie: money, a handsome husband, two daughters, and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though she can't stop thinking about work while she's at home and she dreams of domesticity while at the office. But Laurence gave up on happiness long ago, choosing instead to manifest the perfect image of wife, mother, daughter, homemaker, and career woman. It is only when she is relentlessly torn by the competing needs of her family and jarred into recognition of her own predicament by the despair of her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, that Laurence begins to resist the hand she has been dealt.

The Image of Her, the 1966 final novel by Simone de Beauvoir, freshly translated here by Lauren Elkin, is rooted in the feminist revolutions of its era, yet it remains a strikingly relevant confrontation with the limits that society places on women and their power.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300287178
• ISBN13: 9780300287172
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

a wonderful work

De Beauvoir's novel Les Belle Images is a wonderful work of fiction which simultaneously exposes and works to subvert mainstream social ideologies. It is representative both of her philosophical leanings toward existentialism as well as her commitment to feminism and of a new social role for women. The characters in the novel are passive, having accepted as necessary the roles society has decided for them. They are shallow, interested only in how they are being perceived by others. With the exception of Laurence (the main character), all the characters are complacent, content with living according to the goals and expectations of mainstream bourgeoisie society. Laurence struggles against this lack of morality, and is discontented by the passive role of woman that she has been forced to submit to.