The Image of Her - Simone de Beauvoir

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The Image of Her

by
Simone de Beauvoir

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Image of Her
Author:	Simone de Beauvoir
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1966 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	196 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	The Image of Her - US
	The Image of Her - UK
	The Image of Her - Canada
	Les belles images - Canada
	Les belles images - France
	Die Welt der schönen Bilder - Deutschland
	Le belle immagini - Italia
	Las bellas imágenes - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

French title: Les belles images
Translated by Lauren Elkin
Previously translated by Patrick O'Brian, as Les Belles Images (1968)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly done

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Books Abroad	.	Summer/1968	Edwin Jahiel
Le Monde	.	25/1/1967	Pierre-Henri Simon
The NY Times*	.	6/3/1968	Charles Poore
The NY Times Book Rev.*	F	3/3/1968	Anthony Burgess
Sunday Times*	.	31/12/1967	Cyril Connolly
Time*	D	23/2/1968	.
The Times*	.	6/1/1968	Mary Conroy
The Times	A	18/4/2025	Ceci Browning
Die Zeit	.	29/3/1968	François Bondy

(* review of a different translation)

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, and reviewers of the original and previous translation pretty underwhelmed

  From the Reviews:

"One is reminded of those Republic Studios western films which, years ago, came always as one half of a double feature: undersize in length and strength, allowing the viewer to think of something else while watching, and permitting one to skip whole chunks at a time while still retaining the meaning of the whole. (...) The best part is on pages 202 and 203 where two easy ways of opening champagne bottles are mentioned, but, alas, no details are given, so readers who have trouble opening champagne bottles will go on having trouble." - Edwin Jahiel, Books Abroad

"Her tale, told in a prose that is tumescent with parentheses, has the charm, if that's the word I want, of a Jill in the pulpit. (...) She is a priestess of a hemidemivenerable cult called existentialism. Now, we find her sketching styles at garden parties. What's up ? Why, she's boring from within for a change. You'll find activist declarations, thick as Mao sayings in a box of Peking cookies, all through this bloodcurdiingly worldly entertainment. (...) Papa takes Laurence to Greece. It might have been a cheerful little drain on the franc. But Miss de Beauvoir fizzes it up into a tedious tirade. Naturally Laurence has a nervous breakdown." - Charles Poore, The New York Times

"Frankly (or Francophobically), I think that, if Les Belles Images had been the work of a British or American author, it would never have gotten past the publisher's first reader. It is a dismal nullity. (...) Mme. de Beauvoir serves up yesterday's mashed potatoes with the flourishes of an Escoffier who thinks he has invented a new triumph of the haute cuisine. She ought to visit the big world outside France, where they manage these things better -- meaning the novel of domestic frustration, dead souls, affluent despair, and all the cognate fictional subjects which (dare one whisper it ?) are growing just a little stale." - Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Book Review

"Les Belles Images is little more than a long short story, or perhaps seems no more because of its consistent readability. It is a book for one sitting which will disappear if another member of the family picks it up. The theme as the impact of the real world, the world of hunger, cancer, Vietnam and loneliness on a successful little group of rich bourgeois who are determined to keep it out. (...) Everything happens as it does in real life: there are no easy solutions and Laurence's image is sacrificed so that Catherine may have her chance. (...) Les Belles Images is more like a film-script than a Forsyte saga." - Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times

"In its brief compass (long enough to irritate, short enough to finish between lunch and cocktails), the novel lambastes modern life, love, marriage and values with thoroughgoing cynicism. It is bound to have an insidious appeal; it can make a woman wallow in self-pity. (...) All the outward affluence and fake well-being, says Author de Beauvoir, are the worst kind of illusion: reality is bile. Yet on the very last page, there seems to be a smidgen of vague hope, at least for the children -- maybe. That is small compensation for a novel that is distinguished otherwise only for its predictable course and Gallic ennui." - Time

"The trouble is that, cut loose from herself. Madame de Beauvoir needs more than intelligence and art to bring her work to life. Her intuition is amazingly blunt edged, particularly when leading her to make a judgment. When she tries to find some values for Laurence to live by, an uneasy sentimentality creeps in. One feels that although she is doing her best she cannot really accept that other people need different reasons for living from her own. (...) Les Belles Images is a pleasant book which describes a particular sort of unhappiness rather well but in the end one feels the usual lack of communication. Although Madame de Beauvoir is very intelligent and very honest she isn't really writing about me." - Mary Conroy, The Times

"It’s with nods to the (remarkably familiar) chaos of the postwar world that de Beauvoir makes this existential angst seem urgent rather than trivial. (...) This timeless and surprisingly jocular novel has the same richness of feeling and continental sophistication as Annie Ernaux’s auto-fiction, plus a dash of the wealthy carelessness found in F Scott Fitzgerald’s best known works. De Beauvoir’s primary concern, it becomes clear as the domestic drama unfurls further, is the duty we have to those whom we claim to love. Although if you ask me, the novel’s most useful provision is a solution to heartbreak: put on dark sunglasses and go somewhere expensive for lunch. It’s the best book I’ve read so far this year." - Ceci Browning, The Times

"Wenn wir diesen Roman zu Ende gelesen haben, dessen Sprache leider selber oft in den Bildern oder Klischees steckenbleibt, so bleibt einzig Catherine, vielleicht noch ein wenig ihre Mutter in unserer Erinnerung. Vor diesem sparsamen, gelungenen Mädchenporträt fragt man sich, ob diese Maschinerie von lauter auswechselbaren Personen wirklich die neokapitalistische Konsumgesellschaft vorstellt und nicht einfach die trostlose realistische Welt der „Erwachsenen“." - François Bondy, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Image of Her is mostly written in the third person, but it occasionally briefly drifts into first-person narration. The shifts barely matter: the novel centers entirely on Laurence, it is her story, whether told from within or without.
       Laurence has a successful career in advertising -- she is a 'creative' --, married to architect Jean-Charles; they have two daughters: Catherine, aged ten and a half, and the younger Louise. Laurence has also been having an affair with a co-worker, Lucien -- though she insists, or at least tells herself, that at this point: "Lucien is marginal". Life seems to be good -- and yet she wonders: "Something's not right: what is it ?"
       Molded by her mother, Laurence had been: "An impeccable little girl, a hard-working teenager, a perfect young woman". Still, she'd gone through a depressive phase five years earlier, but taking up work -- and finding such success at it -- seems to have helped right her then. As she tells herself:

Now there's no longer any reason to fall apart. There's work ahead of me, people all around me, I'm happy with my life.

Among the few nagging concerns is daughter Catherine, who seems to be feeling -- and being crushed -- by the weight of the world; as Louise tells Laurence: "Maman, Catherine is sad, she cries at night". Laurence does her best to protect her daughter from how ugly the world is, forbidding her, for example, from even looking at newspapers. Still, enough of the misery others are dealing with in the world at large seeps through to the young girl, and it overwhelms her; at least the thought of becoming a doctor cheers her up -- a way that she could help children ("Their mothers, too, but especially the children").
It slowly becomes clear that Laurence herself is more sensitive and vulnerable than she wants to let on or admit, walling herself and her emotions off. As lover Lucien observes:

You don't drink, you never lose your cool, I've never seen you cry even once, you're afraid of losing yourself in something, or someone. That's what I call a refusal of life.

Recognizing how similar Catherine is to her -- "You had the same seriousness, at her age", her father observes -- Laurence wonders (and clearly worries): "Will she be a lot like me ?" Laurence has steeled herself outwardly -- Lucien complains: "There are women who are frigid in bed, but you're worse. You're frigid in the heart" -- but in fact remains fragile; after wrecking the car when she swerves to avoid hitting a cyclist, she faints in the aftermath. (Husband Jean-Charles, who is with her, is only annoyed at the expense of the totaled car and thinks she: "should have been able to manage it in a less expensive way"; he would have been fine with her running over the cyclist ("Everyone would have testified in your favour", he insists when she notes that she might have killed him).)
Buying a Christmas present for Catherine, Laurence and Jean-Charles settle on a camera, which is fine:

Catherine will be happy. But I wanted to give her something else -- security, happiness, the joy of being alive. That's what I'm really selling when I launch a product. A lie.

Laurence recognizes that she has become, in some ways, unmoored:

When I was eighteen, I had convictions. Something of that remains, not much, more a kind of nostalgia. She doubts her own judgement: it's such a question of mood and circumstance. I'm hardly capable, when I leave the cinema, of saying whether or not I liked the film.

Beyond her concern about Catherine, shifts in relationships also figure prominently in the novel. Laurence decides to end her affair with Lucien ("Even adultery can become mechanical, she thinks"), while Gilbert, the man her mother, Dominique, has been seeing is ending their seven-year affair. (Dominique is separated from her husband; Gilbert is married but has now fallen in love with (yet) another woman -- a nineteen-year-old, no less (he's fifty-six), who he is set to marry; it's all very French.) It's a crushing blow for Dominique: first off, Gilbert is fabulously wealthy, allowing her a very luxurious lifestyle, but worse than that is that in her world and circles: "a woman without a man is déclassé -- she's come down in the world. She has no place". She desperately tries to cling to Gilbert, while Gilbert tries to enlist Laurence's help in smoothing things over (a position she is obviously very uncomfortable with but can't entirely get out of).
Laurence's father is a bit of the odd man out, though Laurence (and her girls) have a good relationship with him. He's obviously less concerned with the superficial -- he has the entire Pléiade-collection, and actually reads those volumes -- but that put him at odds with Laurence's mother:

Dominique refused to understand. He chose mediocrity. No. He chose not to compromise, to have time to reflect and cultivate his interests, instead of the frenetic lifestyle everyone leads in Maman's circle, that I lead, too.

But even a father-daughter getaway to Greece doesn't calm the inner turmoil; as de Beauvoir nicely sums it up with Laurence's return:

     Jean-Charles was waiting at the airport.
     -- Did you have a good trip ?
     -- Wonderful !
     She wasn't lying, she wasn't telling the truth. All the words we say ! Words ...

       Certainly, open, honest dialogue and any true opening up -- or rather, the lack thereof -- are an issue here. It's remarkable how often characters in the novel insist that information should be withheld from others: "Laurence, please don't speak to anyone about this", Dominque begs her daughter; "promise not to say anything to Louise, she's too little" Laurence tells Catherine; "Don't tell Dominique" Gilbert implores Laurence; "please don't tell Catherine about things that are upsetting" Laurence asks her daughter's friend, Brigitte; etc. etc. The lack of openness and forthrightness is obviously a problem all around.
       A crack appears in the form of Brigitte, Catherine's slightly older classmate and good friend, a Jewish girl living in a less over-protective household with her father (who lets her read newspapers !) and university-student brother. Jean-Charles disapproves of her potential influence -- "everyone knows Jewish children are worryingly mature for their age and excessively emotional" --, and Laurence has some concerns as well. When Catherine's grades disappoint -- even as Brigitte excels -- Jean-Charles is even more disturbed.
       Solutions are offered: Laurence's sister, who turned to religion, encourages Laurence to send Catherine to Sunday school so she can make her First Communion ("Death, evil -- it's hard for a child to take those things on board without a belief in God. If she had faith, it would help her"), but sensibly de Beauvoir/Laurence dismiss that as a solution. But when Jean-Charles wants to send Catherine to a psychologist Laurence gives in, and while Mme Frossard finds Catherine on the whole to be emotionally well-balanced, well, the thing about Brigitte is that: "she was older and more precocious than Catherine, and their conversations seem to upset her"; among the professional's advice is: "It would also be good to find other, less mature friends for my daughter".
       A crossroads comes when Brigitte invites Catherine to go away for the Easter holidays with her, but Jean-Charles doesn't want her to go and proposes a family-trip to Rome instead. (As if Easter -- the ultimate Catholic holiday -- weren't on the nose enough, Jean-Charles (though a confirmed non-believer) suggests a pilgrimage to Rome, of all places, at that time ??!?) Laurence agrees -- and Catherine doesn't think to protest, beyond worrying that Brigitte will be disappointed --, but Laurence reflects some more and, ultimately, is perhaps ready to step in and see to it that poor little Catherine does not wind up as 'the image of her'.
       As Laurence recognizes, even if she has turned out 'well', there's a lot of deep-seated damage that she's never managed to put right (as her sister apparently managed to, by turning to religion). It's partially a generational thing, the trauma of the times she grew up in -- "The gas chambers, Hiroshima -- there were many reasons why, in 1945, a child of eleven would feel completely stupefied" --, leading to Laurence's hopeless attempt to try to shield Catherine from the different but also terrible contemporary horrors. And there are constant reminders that maybe her upbringing was less than ideal, as when Laurence argues regarding Brigitte:

-- But it's very important to have a friend ! I said.
-- You got along very well without them, Dominque replied.

       Laurence responds to this: "Not as well as you think", a small bit of her growing understanding that maybe she must give her daughters a little more room, if she wants to avoid them becoming damaged souls like she is. There's some hope at the end of the novel -- though one wonders whether Laurence is really equipped to see it through.
       Laurence is an interesting character, and de Beauvoir's approach in The Image of Her effective in presenting how adrift she is, internally and externally. The comfortable upper-middle-class life everyone here seems to enjoy is an effective backdrop: Jean-Charles might complain about the cost of the wrecked car, but really, they have no material worries, just as Dominique losing Gilbert might mean a small step down in standing and comfort but still leaves her very comfortably positioned. Meanwhile, there are constant reminders that much of the world is a mess and that many people are suffering -- but none of it really directly touches them.
       Dialogue-heavy, and shifting easily from third- to first-person and back, The Image of Her is engagingly presented -- and there's more to it than there seems at first sight.

- M.A.Orthofer, 8 January 2026

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Links:

The Image of Her:

Yale University Press publicity page
Vintage Classics publicity page
Folio publicity page
Rowohlt publicity page
Einaudi publicity page
Edhasa publicity page
Q & A with translator Lauren Elkin

Reviews (* review of a different translation):

Simone de Beauvoir:

Simone de Beauvoir at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of French literature
Other books from Yale University Press - The Margellos World Republic of Letters under review

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About the Author:

French writer Simone de Beauvoir lived 1908 to 1986.

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