Simone Weil (Paperback)

Simone Weil was reading the evening paper aloud to her family aged five and by her early teens had mastered classical Greek and several modern languages. She is now regarded as one of the twentieth-century's most influential women, an essayist and philosopher whose often controversial writings are based on a deep suspicion of power, and have had a powerful impact on contemporary French and English social thought. Francine du Plessix Gray chronicles Weil's life from her early days as a non-conformist left-wing student to her service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War and her work with the French Resistance. Gray also documents Weil's pathological need to share the suffering of others, her complex views about female sexuality, her deep love of Christianity, and her lifelong struggle with anorexia, which resulted in her death at the age of 34.