BEAUVOIR Simone de (1908-1986). Typescript, The... Lot 10

BEAUVOIR Simone de (1908-1986). Typescript, The Guest, [ca. 1937-1941]; 63 pages in-4 (edges of a few pages a bit frayed). The first two rejected chapters of the novel L'Invitée. This typescript is a double carbon; it is paginated and prepared for editing in red ballpoint pen: chapter I, pp. 2-26; chapter II, pp. 27-64. Begun in the fall of 1937, the novel L'Invitée was first called Légitime défense. Beauvoir finished it in the summer of 1941. The first of Beauvoir's "autobiographical" novels, L'Invitée deals with Sartre and Beauvoir's lifelong taste for extended couples, the small, very intimate groups they formed with their friends, leading to cross-sexual relationships that were often difficult for Beauvoir to bear. L'Invitée allows Beauvoir to put herself on stage, to transcribe in literary terms the feelings of jealousy that Sartre's relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz inspires in her. It was Sartre who gave the typescript of L'Invitée to Gallimard. On the advice of Brice Parrain and Sartre, the first two chapters are deleted. The novel was published in August 1943, with great success: it was the birth of Simone de Beauvoir as a writer. These two rejected chapters remained unpublished until their publication in 1979 in Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier; the present typescript was used for the composition of this edition. Attached is a letter from Éditions Gallimard to Fernande Gontier, concerning the publication of these chapters (18 July 1978). PROVENANCE Fernande Gontier (Sotheby's Paris, 21 May 2008, No. 92).