Éditions Gallimard

Éditions Gallimard is the Paris publishing house that originally published Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe in France in 1949. The work first appeared in two volumes, Les faits et les mythes and L’expérience vécue, and the publisher later helped bring a new English translation into being through the efforts of Anne-Solange Noble.

Publication of Le deuxième sexe

Éditions Gallimard published Le deuxième sexe in 1949, copyrighting the work that year. The original French edition appeared in two volumes: Les faits et les mythes and L’expérience vécue. The division reflects the book’s broad movement between accounts of women’s historical and social position and examinations of lived experience.

The book’s later publication history crossed national and language boundaries. The English translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier was copyrighted in 2009 and first appeared in hardcover in Great Britain through Jonathan Cape. It was subsequently published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 2010; the Vintage Books edition followed in May 2011.

Role in the retranslation

Anne-Solange Noble of Éditions Gallimard believed in the retranslation project for years and persistently sought an editor willing to undertake it. Her efforts led to the involvement of Ellah Allfrey at Jonathan Cape, who worked with the translators step by step for three years, with support from LuAnn Walther at Knopf. Gallimard’s contribution was therefore not limited to the book’s original French publication: Noble helped set in motion the lengthy editorial process behind the later English version.

Noble also introduced the translators to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir’s adopted daughter. The first meeting took place over lunch on the rue du Bac, where the group marked the occasion with a toast to the semicolon. The anecdote places the publisher’s part in the retranslation within a close collaboration among editors, translators, and people connected to the author.

Significance in the book’s publication history

Éditions Gallimard anchors the book’s French publication history and reappears in the story of its English retranslation. The sequence—from the two-volume French edition of 1949 to the British and American hardcovers and the 2011 Vintage edition—shows how the work moved across publishing houses and languages while retaining its connection to its original publisher.