Beyond the Tar Door

PUBLICATION of this study of Simone Weil coincides with an acclaimed biography of her Sorbonne classmate of the late 1920s, the more celebrated Simone de Beauvoir. The latter book recounts every phase of what a reviewer calls “one of the great lives of the twentieth century.” The political causes in which Miss de Beauvoir was so “brilliant,” her ferocious authors’ quarrels, her doomed romances, the “brilliant” pioneering work that made her the “founder of feminism”—in 718 pages, no facet of her “greatness” is neglected.

Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil, by David McLellan (Poseidon, 316 pp., $22.95)