The French author and mystic Simone Weil was born in Paris into a well-to-do family of distinguished intellectuals. During her lifetime she published only articles, dealing mainly with political and social issues, in obscure syndicalist sheets. Her uncompromising dedication to the search for truth and social justice as a way of life made her a significant though much debated personality. She lived a life of stringent deprivation. In spite of ill health she worked in factories, joined the anti-Franco volunteers in Spain, and worked as a farm laborer in the south of France after the 1940 defeat. After 1942 she lived in exile in New York and then in England. Jewish by birth, she wished to partake fully in the suffering of the victims of Nazism, and she allowed herself to die of hunger.

While in her twenties she was trained by Alain (Émile Auguste Chartier...