Simone de Beauvoir (1908–…) was a maverick, an icon of a generation, a novelist, and a philosopher; but most importantly she was the life-long lover of Jean-Paul Sartre. Or so orthodoxy would have it. That de Beauvoir was a woman, and a woman whose book The Second Sex caused uproar in every circle, including the intellectual left, doubtless has never biased the reading of her philosophy as merely ancillary to key existentialist texts, and has no bearing on the fact that she is seldom considered to be an interesting thinker…