Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction
Almost 300 letters, mostly unpublished, from the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc, including The Second Sex author’s rejection of her friend’s romantic advances, have sold for €56,700 (£51,500).
Sent between 1945 to a month before Leduc’s death in 1972, the 297 letters reveal the intense friendship between the two women, with Beauvoir serving as an editor and source of unwavering support for Leduc, who she once called “the most interesting woman I know” and drew on her for her analysis of lesbianism in The Second Sex. Despite counting Jean Genet and Albert Camus among her fans, Leduc did not gain fame until the final years of her life, with her frank depiction of lesbian sex regarded as unacceptable for much of her career.
The letters sold on Tuesday, with auction house Sotheby’s describing the “remarkable” set as charting “a complex and ambiguous relationship … where unrequited amorous passion, tenderness and mutual admiration tinged with mistrust mingle”.
Beauvoir and Leduc first met in 1945. Leduc made clear her attraction early, sending Beauvoir the manuscript for her autobiographical novel L’Affamée, which Beauvoir later described to her lover Nelson Algren as “a diary in which she tells everything about her love for me. It is a wonderful book.” But in a letter, dated 17 July 1945 and included in the collection sold on Tuesday, Beauvoir rejected her advances.
“Despite my colossal indifference, I was very moved by your letter and your journal. You tell me about my loyalty, I admire yours. I believe that thanks to our mutual esteem and trust, we will achieve a balance in our relations,” Beauvoir wrote. “It is strange to find out that you are so precious to someone: you know that you are never precious to yourself; there is a mirage effect there which will certainly dissipate quickly. In any case, this feeling can not bother me more than flatter me … I would like you not to be afraid of me any more, that you get rid of all this fearful side which seems to me so unjustified. I respect you too much for this kind of mistrust, of apprehension, to have any reason to exist.”
Leduc would later write of this rejection: “She has explained that the feeling I have for her is a mirage. I don’t agree.” Still, the two women maintained a close relationship for decades. Beauvoir’s letters, sent from the US, Italy, Greece, the USSR and Iceland, were filled with praise and encouragement, as well as historical details; from Cuba in March 1960, Beauvoir described meeting Fidel Castro, “a truly exceptional man of intelligence, warmth, vitality, and it is overwhelming when you walk with him to see how much the people adore him”.
From a summer holiday in Ischia in
1949, Beauvoir wrote of Leduc’s then-forthcoming book Ravages: “You are writing a beautiful, courageous book, in which I believe.” From the Sahara in 1950, Beauvoir wrote: “I am wholeheartedly with you in this struggle which you are leading so courageously to write, to live; I admire your energy, I would like this sincere, deep esteem to help you a little.”
Ravages was deemed too shocking to be published in its entirety, with male staff at Gallimard describing an early lesbian sex scene as “enormously and specifically obscene”. In a letter from 1954, Beauvoir wrote: “I am indignant at their prudery, their lack of courage. Sartre too. Do not be broken. You must defend yourself and we will help you. There are other publishers than Gallimard …” A redacted version was published in 1955 but by the following year, Leduc had a breakdown and Beauvoir paid for her to stay in a rehabilitative clinic for six months. “It saddens me to think of you there, locked in that room, despite all your courage,” Beauvoir wrote from Greece, in 1956.
Leduc finally received mainstream recognition for her memoir La Bâtardein 1964. Published with a glowing introduction by Beauvoir, it was translated into several languages and published around the world. But by then 57, Leduc said she had “needed the recognition 20 years ago”; she died eight years later, of breast cancer. An uncensored editon of Ravages was finally published in France in 2000, and translated into English in 2012 as Thérèse and Isabelle. Leduc and De Beauvoir’s friendship was the subject of the 2014 film Violette.