Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée Reading Order

Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958) is the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir's four-volume autobiography, covering her childhood and youth in upper-bourgeois Catholic Paris, her discovery of literature and philosophy, her friendship with Zaza Mabille (whose death closes the memoir with its only moment of narrative tragedy), and her meeting with Sartre at the École Normale Supérieure when both were preparing for the agrégation in philosophy. The title is ironic: 'jeune fille rangée' means a properly brought-up, conventional young woman — which Beauvoir's memoir shows she was on the surface while being, inwardly, from very early, in rebellion against the entire bourgeois Catholic world that had formed her. The memoir traces, with great precision, the process by which a child raised to conventional expectations discovers that she is an intellectual, that she cares more about ideas than about piety or propriety, and that she will have to choose between the comfortable life her milieu expects and the life her intelligence demands. Zaza Mabille, Beauvoir's best friend from childhood, who cannot make this escape and dies young (probably of encephalitis, though Beauvoir always suspected that the constraint of her bourgeois life was a contributing cause), is the shadow presence that gives the memoir its moral urgency.