The Red Virgin

This book of poems commemorates the 50th anniversary of the death of Simone Weil. Classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, acquaintance of Trotsky, Spanish Civil War revolutionary, fighter in De Gaulle's French Resistance, Simone Weil (1909-1943) has also been called the greatest woman philosopher in the Western tradition. Early this century, three contemporaries in Paris - Weil, de Beauvoir and Gertrude Stein - reinvented the female intellect. Of the three, only Weil chose to base her thought on the trauma that war, rape, slavery and bias inflict. This title won the 1993 Brittingham Prize.