SOURCE: Fallaize, Elizabeth. Review of Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir, by Toril Moi. French Studies 45, no. 1 (January 1991): 102-03.

In the following review, Fallaize outlines the themes of Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir.

This volume [Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir] has a rather curious format, drawing together an overview of Toril Moi's well-known work on feminist literary theory by Michael Payne, an interview with Moi by Laura Payne, and two new essays by Moi on Simone de Beauvoir. In the second of her essays Moi addresses the question of why it is that readers of ‘La Femme rompue’ frequently refuse to read the story in the way that Beauvoir intended. Moi offers a series of brilliant analyses, converging on her central proposition that to share Beauvoir's position is to share her investment in epistemological control, and to condemn the narrator as incapable of generating stable versions...