As the pandemic now moves into a different phase, it is possible to turn our attention to other matters, such as those considered in these new reviews. The reviews for this issue include our first review essay, which compares the English translations of Beauvoir’s recently published novella, Les Inséparables; a review of an interdisciplinary work that considers the legacy of Beauvoir’s views about sex, lesbians, and race and class; and a review of a book in an emerging area for Beauvoir studies—ecofeminism.¹ These pieces manifest the diversity of Beauvoir’s publications and how they connect to contemporary concerns.

Carolyn Shread specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literatures and cultures and translation studies.² Her captivating review essay compares the British and US translations of Beauvoir’s novella Les Inséparables, published in 2020 and reviewed in issue 32.1 of our journal.³ The English translations of Beauvoir’s posthumous story—the British as The Inseparables and the American as Inseparable—were published in 2021.⁴ Shread celebrates the rapidity of the translations and the skilled background of the translators, and she also reveals the strengths and weaknesses in both translations. She considers the paratexts of the two translations and observes how formative the experiences fictionalized in the novel were for Beauvoir. Significantly, Shread also draws important parallels between the depiction of oppressive social structures in the novel and in The Second Sex.⁵

The second reviewer, Lori Marso, has publications on feminist political theory, including Beauvoir’s work, on postcolonial and African American political thought, and on film.⁶ She reviews Meryl Altman’s magisterial Beauvoir in Time, a culmination of many years of thinking and publishing on Beauvoir.⁷ Altman examines Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, her other philosophical essays, and her autobiographies to reframe arguments in her text that appear flawed in some way. Marso’s lively review highlights how Altman situates Beauvoir’s ideas and focuses on the chapter “Beauvoir and Blackness,” which for her suggests further lines of inquiry into other texts, such as “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.”⁸

Our final reviewer, Marie-Anne Casselot, specializes in feminist existential phenomenology, the importance of gender in public space, and the history of ecofeminism.⁹ These interests guide her penetrating reading of Geneviève Pruvost’s work Quotidien politique: Féminisme, écologie et subsistance.¹⁰ Pruvost is a sociologist of gender and work, and Casselot’s review shows how Pruvost’s ecofeminist analysis of housework can be connected with Beauvoir’s criticisms of the ways such work limits women’s lives. Quotidien politique argues that subsistence is intertwined with all spheres of life, from the domestic to the professional. However, Casselot contends that the book’s argument would be enhanced by greater engagement with decolonial ecologies and different subsistence practices.

Each of these reviews opens up a fresh strand of research to follow—questions about translation as well as the relationship between Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical texts, how reading Beauvoir in historical perspective could alter our interpretation of and response to her views, and the connections between Beauvoir’s work and ecofeminism.