Simone de Beauvoir

When Things of the Spirit Come First is Simone de Beauvoir's 'first' work of fiction. After a number of false starts, in 1937 she submitted this collection of interlinked stories to a publisher. But it was turned down by both Gallimard and Grasset.

The Blood of Others is a novel by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir first published in 1945 and depicting the lives of several characters in Paris leading up to and during the Second World War. The novel explores themes of freedom and responsibility.

The Ethics of Ambiguity is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, after which she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness. The following year, over a six-month …