First love: The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir, reviewed

‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects — Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, say. Other books, though, would have done as well to stay lost. Did the world really need to set eyes on Harper Lee’s first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird in the form of Go Set a Watchman? Probably not, although you can see why a publisher wouldn’t quibble with one more title from such a famous name.

Unpublished in Simone de Beauvoir’s lifetime, The Inseparables was written in 1954. The Second Sex (and her power- couple relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre) had made her a global intellectual celebrity as well as an icon of the women’s movement; her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honour, securing her reputation as an author. Yet something about this novel gave her pause.

The Inseparables is based closely on de Beauvoir’s friendship with Elisabeth Lacoin (known as Zaza), which lasted from when they met as nine-year-old schoolgirls until Zaza’s sudden death in 1929, just before her 22nd birthday. In another writer you might point to the intensely personal nature of the source material to explain the reluctance to publish, but de Beauvoir rarely shied from revelation: her novels drew heavily (and sometimes contentiously) on her real-life experiences and intimates. Besides, she would go on to tell the story of Zaza in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

That leaves the fear that de Beauvoir didn’t publish this novel because she didn’t think it worth reading. It is, happily, an unfounded fear. The Inseparables is slim, elegant, achingly tragic and unaffectedly lovely in its evocation of the closeness between girls — and the pressures that sunder them.