Simone de Beauvoir is often remembered as a formidable philosopher, feminist theorist, and novelist—one who reshaped modern thought on freedom, gender, and ethics. Yet her legacy also resides in the complexity of her private writings. Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren, long considered a source of discomfort for some and revelation for others, function as a messy and volatile laboratory where the emotional raw materials of The Second Sex were first tested. A Transatlantic Love Affair first introduced English-speaking readers to this intimate, playful, and domestic Beauvoir in 1998, while the French public encountered it soon after with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir’s translation. Between 1947 and 1964, Beauvoir wrote 304 letters to Nelson Algren, spanning oceans and ideologies, offering a deeply human portrait of a philosopher often mythologized for her unflinching intellectual rigor. Unlike her canonical correspondence with Jean-Paul Sartre, these letters reveal an emotionally layered, linguistically adventurous Beauvoir, capable of fierce love, self-effacing humor, and acting like a dutiful wife.
Yet the letters to Algren are more than biographical curiosities or sentimental confessions—they can be read as a precious philosophical and feminist resource. While Beauvoir chronicled much of her life in five autobiographies, the first publication of these letters offered a new vantage point, illuminating her emotional style differently from her correspondence with Sartre and providing nuance to events she narrated elsewhere. These letters trace the private scaffolding beneath her existential feminism, in dialogue with—not opposition to—her autobiographical work. Within the syntax of longing and domesticity, the premises of The Second Sex take shape, revealing a subjectivity lived amid the contradictions and ambiguities her published work would theorize.
The correspondence is striking for its unilateral nature: only Beauvoir’s letters have been published, as Algren’s remain unavailable per his will. This asymmetry underscores a philosophical tension: the problem of the one-sided narrative, of selfhood forged in dialogue but preserved in fragments. Written in a language Beauvoir described as “broken childish English” (23) yet “the most direct and simple way” to communicate with Algren (34), her idioms paved the way to a site of philosophical creativity. Vulnerability is rendered into grammar, intimacy mediated through a foreign tongue. Liliane Lazar noted that even in self-deprecating English, Beauvoir maintained remarkable control; her acknowledged clumsiness mirrored the thematic terrain of the letters (negotiations of love, power, gender, and authorship), revealing a nuanced Beauvoir: intellectual yet passionate, free yet deeply in love.
Returning to these letters today, I suggest reading them not as offering wholly new feminist insight, but as a vivid reminder—echoing The Ethics of Ambiguity—that feminism never requires perfect consistency or a life free from contradiction. That conviction was already philosophically articulated in Beauvoir’s postwar publications. What these letters reveal, however, is how such a conviction was not only theorized but lived. Started around the same time as The Ethics of Ambiguity, the correspondence with Algren captures this understanding not as abstract principle but as growing, intimate certainty—experienced in real time, through the push and pull of love, self-doubt, irony, and defiance. They confront questions still unresolved in feminist thought: Can a woman be emotionally submissive in private yet politically radical in public? Can one love a man deeply, even irrationally, while critiquing male dominance? These are questions Beauvoir lived through, with all the ambiguity her own ethics demanded.
The Public Surprised: The Reception of a Private Beauvoir
When the letters had been first published, it hit Beauvoir studies like a love bomb. Readers, scholars, and feminists were startled—not because Beauvoir had loved, but because of how she loved. Here was the existential high priestess of freedom declaring herself a “faithful” and “obedient […] Arabian wife” (227), promising to sweep floors, buy rum-cake, and withhold touch unless “being allowed to do so” (71). She called Algren “my dearest husband,” “my one-week and forever husband,” “my beloved crocodile,” “my sweetest monster” (17, 20, 85, 417), and longed to embrace him “as a loving wife” should (15). This was not mere intimacy; it was submission performed with a wink, a swoon, and possibly a smirk.
The reaction was swift: confusion, discomfort, even suspicion. How could the architect of the modern feminist canon so willingly speak the language of domestic devotion, even servility? Where was the composed theorist who unmasked “woman” as a cultural fiction, the philosopher who taught generations that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”? Wasn’t this bad feminism? Perhaps this discomfort reveals more about contemporary readers than Beauvoir herself. These letters were written in situation, not composed for posterity. She never claimed ideological purity. As she quipped, “I got the paper about ‘Simone, a new kind of nun’—are you sure I was a nun? But it is a nice paper, thank you” (529). This wry self-awareness suggests a lived feminism that admits feeling, contradiction, and even irrationality. The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex mirror this: freedom is entangled, situated, and often ambivalent. As Lisa Appignanesi noted, “[in The Second Sex] the women in love ‘lives on her knees’ and few crimes ‘entail worse punishment than the generous fault of putting oneself entirely in another’s hands,’ [in her letters to Algren] we see the struggle with the raw emotion which did, indeed, have her on her knees.” The letters, then, didn’t reveal failure but conscious contradiction—ambiguity made real.
Algren was not Sartre—and, perhaps, here is the whole point. Sartre was her equal, her “necessary other,” her toad to match her frog. Algren, by contrast, was a crocodile: brash, earthy, masculine—a predator in their playful, at least in the fairy-tale register of pet names and playful submission. Beauvoir’s self-description as an “obedient Arabian wife” exaggerated, performed, and skewed patriarchal scripts. There’s camp here, and there’s critique. Yet her vulnerability is genuine. Unlike with Sartre, she could imagine a shared domestic life with Algren, folding her existence into his—his city, his language, his habits. Still, she never fully made that leap, aware she could not surrender her life with Sartre: “you know, I could give up much more than a nice young man for your sake, I could give up most of things; but I should not be the Simone you like, if I could give up my life with Sartre. I should be a dirty creature, a treacherous and selfish woman. I want you to know that, whatever you decide in the future: it is not by lack of love that I don’t stay with you” (202). Following Lazar’s reading, Beauvoir “loved both men sincerely and intensely, in different but equally real ways. She didn’t want to choose. She hoped to make with Algren the same arrangement she had with Sartre—Sartre as necessary love, Algren as contingent. But Nelson [Algren] wouldn’t see it that way. The ocean between them only widened” (141, translation mine). And I would go even further than Lazar: the letters suggest a painful hierarchy. Her language—calling Algren a crocodile, a monster—hints at the shadow cast by a man whose desire for domesticity conflicted with her need for freedom. In this tension, love and selfhood collide: Algren offered affection, but Sartre allowed her to remain the Simone she had chosen to become.
Algren attempted to split her in two, claiming there were “two Beauvoirs”: the public intellectual and the private lover. Beauvoir responded with a shrug and a smile: “One is enough to love you in a proper way. […] Darling, anyway if you stick to the idea that I am two women, be sure they both love you, and maybe the nicest is the most stupid” (116). Irony does the work here: she resists yet performs his fantasy, absorbing his dichotomy into her own ethics of ambiguity.
Feminist Laboratory and Misogynistic Fallacy
As Céline Léon argued, this correspondence is not a sentimental appendix to Beauvoir’s philosophy but part of its groundwork. In 1948, Beauvoir wrote to Algren with striking clarity: “when I look at the women around me, I see that they have specific problems and that it would be worthwhile analyzing them in their own right” (135). That line could almost be transplanted into The Second Sex. Even more revealing is her confession after returning from America: “I think I was wrong to try at once to write the book about women which I began before going to America—it is dead for me just now; I cannot begin again where I left just as if nothing had happened” (26). America, and perhaps more importantly Algren, disrupted her earlier approach to the “book about women” and forced a reframing. Emotional upheaval, far from hindering her thought, made it more alive—and more honest.
Rather than composing The Second Sex as a dispassionate treatise at a safe distance, Beauvoir was compelled to start over because experience had rendered her first draft obsolete. Algren, and the emotional intensity of their relationship, offered her not only love but fresher insights—from inside dependency, desire, and vulnerability. Themes of submission, identity, and ambivalence are not solved in these letters; they are lived and grappled with. When she wrote, “Oh darling, darling, beloved you, it is hard to write. I did not believe yet, I did not realize that I should not see you before a year—at least, you said—writing makes me know” (196-197), the longing is not weakness but almost epistemological. Feminist theory is built not in spite of this vulnerability but through it. Beauvoir didn’t abandon critical distance; she made intimacy part of her method.
Does that make her less feminist? Or does it make feminism more human?
These letters refuse tidy resolution. Instead, they dramatize the tensions Beauvoir would later theorize: the contradiction between freedom and attachment, the costs of love in a patriarchal world, the tightrope between being-for-herself and being-for-another. If she sounds torn, it is because feminism, at its best, is not a doctrine of clarity but a practice of engaging contradictions. As she wrote in The Second Sex, “men experience more forcefully the opacity of woman’s subjectivity; they cannot, through any sympathetic effect, penetrate her singular experience: the quality of her erotic pleasure, the discomforts of menstruation, the pain of childbirth—they are condemned to ignorance” (300, translation mine). The letters to Algren echo this inaccessibility: emotional, embodied, unresolved, they refuse transparency and instead offer a feminism lived in friction, felt before it was fully theorized.
Enter the backlash. The most persistent critique is that loving so fiercely, so submissively at times, discredited Beauvoir’s feminist authority. If she felt heartbreak, dependency, or longing, wasn’t she betraying the cause? This is the misogynistic fallacy: the belief that a feminist must be emotionally invulnerable to be intellectually credible. Sartre could confess his “machismo” without philosophical cost—“we were equals,” he said of Beauvoir, “and strangely, that strengthened my machismo” (translation mine). The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. When Beauvoir expressed tenderness, she was accused of betraying feminism. This isn’t critique; it’s a purity test: men are permitted contradictions, women are policed for them.
However, Beauvoir’s feminist theory doesn’t ask its thinkers to feel less. It asks them to think through what they feel. Feminist integrity cannot be reduced to personal performance, nor confused with emotional austerity. Vulnerability doesn’t cancel resistance. If these love letters scandalize, it is because they expose a feminism that isn’t perfect but practiced—in longing, doubt, domestic fantasy, and philosophical resolve. They are not failures. They are fieldwork.
Ambiguity, Not Duality: Towards a Feminism of Complexity
Beauvoir never tried to resolve tension by pretending it wasn’t there. Her answer was not repression, but recognition. In The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, she advanced perhaps her most enduring contribution to feminist existentialism: contradiction is not failure—it is fact. The self is not a monolith but a mosaic. If we find Beauvoir conflicted in her letters to Algren, it is because she has been doing what her philosophy demanded: living the ambiguity of being. This is not double-dealing, as some readers implied, but genuine ambiguity. Her emotional and intellectual selves coexisted rather than cancelled one another. As she famously wrote: “I have not been a virtuoso writer […], but that wasn’t my aim. I wanted to make myself exist for others by communicating […] a taste of my own life” (634, translation mine). That life encompassed philosophy and passion, writing and washing, Sartre and Algren. There was no need to choose between them; such a choice would have been a patriarchal fantasy, not hers. Feminism, Beauvoir implied, is not the purging of love, longing, or dependency, but navigating these feelings critically, situating them historically, and refusing to be defined by them: “women [have] to behave properly, both with self-respect and enjoying themselves. Even now when they have many rights, it is not so easy” (140).
Yet many still approach these letters seeking ideological betrayal. Beauvoir calling herself an “obedient Arabian wife” (227) or “your loving wife, doing the washing and sweeping” (71) provokes unease, but that says more about our discomfort with feminist complexity than her philosophy. These letters are not deviations from her feminist thought; they are its most intimate proving ground. They dramatize what The Second Sex theorized: women are not born one way or another, but shaped—and sometimes contorted—by the conditions they navigate. Beauvoir’s struggles revealed her humanity, and her writing of them with intelligence and flair confirms her philosophical rigor. Her letters demonstrates that living, loving, and thinking are inseparable, and that feminist existence is not tidy or ideologically pure—it is lived, embodied, and unflinchingly real.
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Thomas Payré
Thomas Payré (AFHEA) is a French Language Tutor at Aberystwyth University, submitting his PhD in Philosophy at Cardiff University and entering the third year of his second PhD in Practice and Theory of Literary Creation at CY Cergy Paris Université. He specialises in phenomenology, philosophy of literature, and 20th-century French thinkers. His research examines intersections between existential phenomenology and literary writings. He has published a book chapter entitled “Autour d’un verre. Proust & la phénoménologie littéraire”, and is working on a forthcoming chapter for The Palgrave Handbook on Frantz Fanon.
