The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir published her final novel Les Belle Images (“Beautiful Images”) in 1966, and it was translated into English in 1968 by Patrick O’Brian. It is here given a new translation by Lauren Elkin and a reworked title, The Image of Her.

Laurence works as a copywriter, promoting products that make middle class life comfortable. She has a near perfect husband and two young daughters. While there is some friction caused in her personal life by having a lover on the side, this is resolved without too much drama by calling the whole relationship off. All should be well, but something keeps niggling at Laurence, a dreadful feeling of impending doom. At one point she wonders if she will always have this feeling of “stones in her chest and sulfurous clouds in her head.” She watches wars on the television and reads about disasters in newspapers while safely cocooned at home. It doesn’t seem right, but such is the communications technology of modern life. While Laurence tries to keep her emotional boat from capsizing, she finds trouble brewing in her family. Her mother, Dominique, is having trouble with her second husband. He has decided to leave her for a younger woman, causing Dominique to go into a full meltdown. And closer to home, her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, has confessed to feeling despair at the state of the world. Her husband insists on therapy for their daughter as a stock standard response, but Laurence feels differently, in the end quite vehemently, that despair is the only rational response to the world.

Written in crystal clear prose and superbly organised, Simone de Beauvoir triumphs in creating the literary version of a panic attack. We watch as the protagonist, Laurence, feels herself slowly swallowed up and suffocated by life’s cruelty and carelessness. Friends and family tax her emotionally with their suffering, while she  hopelessly tries to forge her own path ahead, to escape their folly. At one stage she thinks her easy-going, philosophical father is the model to emulate, but she ultimately finds his peace of mind is built on illusions and self-deceptions.   

Wonderfully absorbing, and written with a genius’s uncanny gift, The Image of Her is a rare literary experience.

The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir. Published by Vintage. $34.99

June 2025