A DANGEROUS LIASION Examines the Lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

France Magazine takes a look at A Dangerous Liasion, by Carole Seymour-Jones in the current issue: "Seymour-Jones examined new primary sources for this dual biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, conducting fresh interviews and delving into previously unavailable correspondence. The result is a page-turning account of the lifelong relationship between two of the 20th century’s most influential intellectuals against the backdrop of their wartime activities, their political and social engage- ment, and Sartre’s enduring blind spot vis-à-vis the Soviet Union."

Starred Review in Booklist for A DANGEROUS LIAISON: A Revelatory Biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Booklist gives top ratings for Carole Seymour-Jones' new biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, A Dangerous Liaison, coming next month: "While they were young students at the Sorbonne, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir, in contradiction to his philosophy of freedom from society’s conventions. She refused but acquiesced to a bond, an “essential love” that lasted 50 years through the tumult of career ambitions, family frictions, wars, and various and sundry affairs as they changed the literary, philosophical, and cultural scene in Europe and around the world. Seymour-Jones draws on interviews with lovers and colleagues of Sartre and Beauvoir as well as previously unpublished papers to deliver a tour-de-force account of their famously creative relationship. They had a kind of twinship that made them prolific in their work, feeding off each other’s intellectual hunger and personal frailties. Their lives, centered in Paris but lived across continents, were full of contradictions: preaching free love but fighting jealousies as some lovers (her affair with Nelson Algren, his with an American journalist and later a Russian interpreter) threatened their bond; his eventual close association with the Resistance when self-absorption and accommodations with the Nazis kept him on the sidelines a long time; their deliberate blindness that made them complicit with Russian communism; her eventual iconic status as a feminist despite having spent much of her life procuring young women lovers for Sartre, seducing them herself first. Extremely detailed, well researched, and completely absorbing."

A DANGEROUS LIASION by Caroline Seymour-Jones in Library Journal

Library Journal takes at A Dangerous Liaison: A Revelatory New Biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Carole Seymour-Jones: "Much has been written about the famous literary couple de Beauvoir and Sartre. Having gained access to their private journals and letters after their deaths, scholars have been reassessing their lives and their relationship. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, Seymour-Jones creates an absorbing and not always positive dual biography of these two complicated individuals. Her work spans their lives from childhood through their war, postwar, and twilight years. The author often underscores the major discrepancies between their memoirs/interviews and what they wrote privately in journals and letters. Like characters in Laclos's eponymous novel, Sartre and de Beauvoir callously played with people's lives; de Beauvoir would choose women for Sartre to seduce and then cruelly reject. Initially, this couple was apathetic about politics and expressed little resistance to the German occupation during World War II despite their later leftist tendencies. An important contribution to the study of de Beauvoir and Sartre that will be appreciated both by general readers and by scholars of French literature and culture and women's studies."—Erica Swenson Danowitz.

Overlook Preview: A DANGEROUS LIASION Explores the DeBeauvoir-Sartre Relationship

Coming this Fall is the revealing new biography of Simone DeBeauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte, A Dangerous Liasion, by Carole Seymour-Jones. Finally available in the U.S., this is a compelling and fascinating account of what lay behind the legend that this brilliant, tempestuous couple created.

Kirkus Reviews notes: "Appearing in what might be called a "sexography," Sartre, the Nobel-winning existentialist philosopher, and Beauvoir, existentialist and pioneering feminist, cavort with a dizzying panoply of partners. . . A spiraling double-helix of a relationship whose sordid beauty fascinates even as it repels."