Baby-Sitter

Elaine Showalter

• Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography by Deirdre Bair
  Cape, 718 pp, £19.95, June 1990, ISBN 0 224 02048 X
• Lettres à Sartre. Vols I: 1930-1939 and II: 1940-1963 by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir
  Gallimard, 400 pp, February 1990, ISBN 2 07 071829 8
• Journal de Guerre, Septembre 1939-Janvier 1941 by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir
  Gallimard, 371 pp, February 1990, ISBN 2 07 071809 3
• In the Shadow of Sartre by Liliane Siegel, translated by Barbara Wright
  182 pp, £12.95, May 1990, ISBN 0 00 215336 X

In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince. She is only his night-time consort in what Sartre and Beauvoir grandly termed their ‘morganatic’ marriage, waiting to be loved and released into her true kingdom of the body and mind.