Beauvoir’s first novel fictionalized a real escalating love pentagon

Evidence

Meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir too was beginning to sketch out her own first novel, though it would not be published until 1943: L’invitée, translated into English as She Came to Stay. She based it on a recent three-way love affair between herself, Sartre and one of her former students, Olga Kosakiewicz. In real life, this was a fraught love triangle that drew in more people until it became a love pentagon and eventually dissolved. By the time it ended, Olga was married to Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost, Sartre was sleeping with Olga’s sister Wanda, and Beauvoir had retired to lick her wounds — and to conduct a long, secret affair with Bost. For the novel, Beauvoir removed a few of the complications, but added a philosophical dimension, as well as a melodramatic finale involving a murder. Sartre also later fictionalised the same events as one of several narrative threads in the first volume of his Roads of Freedom sequence. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 356

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls how existentialist thought grew from lived biographical entanglements, and connects to the philosophy-as-lived-context thread of the book. — connects to: Beauvoir wove people from her own life into her fiction barely disguised — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 557
• SEED: Angle: how a philosophy of freedom, choice and bad faith was hammered out inside a genuinely messy polyamorous arrangement — the messy personal life as laboratory for existentialist ethics.

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir wove people from her own life into her fiction barely disguised #expands (0.90) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 557