Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).

Viewed by many as feminism’s foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.

An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too.  Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir’s idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.

Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer’s watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem. 

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