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Books
Simone Weil by Francine du Plessix Gray
When the brilliant, tragic Simone Weil died in 1943, she was only 34, but her ideas still inspire. Martin Andic ponders a new biography by Francine du Plessix Gray.
Francine du Plessix Gray’s last biographical study, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was highly praised, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her new book on Simone Weil presents a very different and more difficult writer, and a much greater one. Weil was a real philosophical thinker, whose concerns included issues of justice, labour, science and religion, and she deserves more serious attention than de Sade. In her case, mere psychological explanations will not be enough; one must unfold and assess the meaning, implications, presuppositions, coherence, rationality and truth of her ideas. Fortunately, Gray gets these mostly right, and the psychology is not too much in the way, but it does occasionally intrude.
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