So many of the best scholarly biographies I’ve read have been written by women that it never occurred to me that this was an area of scholarship which until relatively recently was dominated by men. I can thank Deirdre Bair for setting me straight on that point. When she started work on her award-winning biography of Samuel Beckett in 1970, she met a degree of resistance and prejudice from male scholars that today takes one’s breath away. Parisian Lives is Bair’s memoir of her experiences of writing the lives of two giants of the literary world, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, and what a story it is.

I’ve read many accounts of Beckett’s life. He was clearly not only one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but also a sincerely good and kind man.  Stories of his generosity are legion. Despite all of that, the prevailing impression of him as some kind of “secular saint”, fostered by his large and loyal coterie of friends, doesn’t tell the whole story.  Beckett could be and occasionally was difficult, manipulative, and suspicious, and he was far more concerned about his posthumous legacy than he wanted anyone to believe. These facets of his character are properly exposed in Bair’s otherwise affectionate account of her interactions with him in the 1970s. He may have had flaws, but a great writer and a great man emerges intact from this memoir.

De Beauvoir was a different beast entirely. She wasn’t far from the end of her life by the time Bair met her and she comes across as a much diminished figure in this memoir, admired globally as an icon of the feminist movement but drained by age of the intellectual power she once wielded.

There’s a third important person at the center of this mostly gentle story: Deirdre Bair herself. As much an account of the challenges of being a woman scholar in the 1970s and 1980s as it is about pursuing Beckett and De Beauvoir, Parisian Lives feels sometimes overly defensive and score-settling in its tone, but she can hardly be blamed. She achieved a lot against the odds and was often badly treated by men who ought to have known and behaved a lot better.