London, 1952. Dina Demetriou has travelled from Cyprus for a better life. She's certain that excitement, adventure and opportunity are out there, waiting - if only she knew where to look. Pierre still repeated: 'We are one,' but now she had discovered that he lived only for himself. Without losing its perfect form, their love, their life, was slowly losing its substance, like those huge, apparently invulnerable cocoons, whose soft integument yet conceals microscopic worms that painstakingly consume them...

It is interesting that there are two key points in the narrative when Francoise appears to really become confident, self assured and happy in her own powers. The first is when she sleeps with Xaviere’s boyfriend, Gerbert. The other is when she takes steps to kill Xaviere. Together, these two acts seem symbolic of her complete domination of the young woman that she previously claimed as her protege; the complete reduction of Xaviere into a thing-in-itself. In the first instance, Francoise proclaims to herself, while gazing in a mirror, “I’ve won.” (p. 375) In the second instance, after turning the gas on in Xaviere’s bedroom, Francoise thinks to herself, “I have done it of my own free will.” The novel closes with the assertion, “She had chosen herself.” (p. 404)

When I’d started, I’d been nervous walking through the two-deep crowd of men huddled around the bar but I soon realised that they hardly saw me. Not when there were half-naked burlesque girls on stage. The punters stood, trilbies in hand, macs over arms, in a state of readiness to leave, despite the fact they’d most likely be there all night. Day after day, minute after minute, Françoise had fled the danger; but the worst had happened, and she had at last come face to face with this insurmountable obstacle, which she had sensed, under vague forms since her earliest childhood. He, on the other hand, was self-centred, rather arrogant, unempathetic, unsensuous - albeit devoted to Francoise. For many 21st century women, he might also come across as being a little too cerebral. The Francoise-Pierre relationship is almost platonic to the point that it wouldn't surprise modern readers that both parties looked for sensual pleasures elsewhere!

We soon realise that Dina is a dreamer: she is desperate to make London her home and therefore her tolerance has to be stretched to accommodate a grotty bedsit, and the often strained relationship with her brother, Peter, with whom she resides. Their relationship treads an unsteady line between comfort of kinship and the tension of familial duty. They represent the bigger question – asking what comes first, family loyalty, or adherence to morality. There are four volumes of autobiography (look out especially for The Prime of Life) and a highly readable life by Deirdre Bair. Criticism Behind Xavière’s maniacal pleasure, behind her hatred and jealousy, the abomination loomed, as monstrous and definite as death. Before Françoise’s very eyes, yet apart from her, existed something like a condemnation with no appeal: free, absolute, irreducible, an alien consciousness was rising.”Pierre’s bad faith is rooted in a self centered desire for those around him to tolerate his own whims and fancies while denying his effects on others. Throughout the story his irrational jealously for Xaviere bubbles up as hostility, which he then projects onto Xaviere herself. Speaking to Francoise, he says, “We wanted to build a real trio, a well-balanced life for three, in which no one was sacrificed. Perhaps it was taking a risk, but at least it was worth trying! But if Xaviere wants to behave like a jealous little bitch, and you have to be the unfortunate victim, while I play the gallant lover, it becomes nothing but a dirty business.” (p. 295) But it is Pierre who is the jealous one, and he is anything but “gallant.” He is more like a child who can’t understand the confusion that he and Francoise must be causing this young woman – a virgin – whose affections are courted from all sides. He desires her precisely because she is young, vital, naive and unpredictable, but at the same time he derides and insults her for acting like a naive and unpredictable young woman. Pierre insists that Xaviere must be free, but he nonetheless wants to possess her, and thus to curtail and control her freedom. All the while, he assures Francoise that it is she, and not Xaviere, that is really special to him. In Pierre, thus, we find a tangled knot of bad faith that derives from his denial of the inconsistencies in his various projects. Simultaneously he want to have a “threesome” in which no one is sacrificed, he wants to retain a special relationship with Francoise, and he wants to possess Xaviere. But these three projects cannot coexist, and for Pierre to act as if they possibly could is to lie to himself. In the chilly workroom, streaks of fog still wept from the walls but the gloom had somehow lifted. Treadles clattered, machines whirred and there was a constant hum as the twelve of us talked and joked in various languages, all the time feeding fabric through the machines. When Madame B came downstairs, we lowered our voices, dipped our heads closer to our work and gathered our brows in sudden concentration.

Dina, a young Greek Cypriot woman, lives with her brother Peter in a rundown boarding house in London. She works in a cafe but dreams of a better life. Peter keeps her on a tight rein and wants her married off. Dina has other plans. When she gets herself an evening job sewing costumes at the Pelican nightclub, she meets and befriends Bebba, another girl from Cyprus. Bebba is glamorous and charismatic. She takes Dina to clubs in Soho and encourages her to live her own life, keeping secrets from Peter. Find sources: "She Came to Stay"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( May 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) A gripping, evocative story . . . well researched and utterly convincing. A real gem of a book' - Gill Paul, bestselling author of The Lost Daughter The three live in love as one, suffering. Gerbert, an actor, comes in as an intermission for both Françoise and Xaviere. It’s Françoise’s story. Intelligent and beautiful, honest with herself and others, she accepts Pierre’s relationship with Xaviere, accepts the shallow Xaviere into her liaison. She has esteem for Pierre, he has respect for her.

Martin and Clemens Kirchlechner

She Came To Stay is a really good fougère, intelligently composed with high-quality ingredients. Aromatic and spicy with an unusual woody drydown, it is a creative, unusual take on a fougère. PIERRE: No, don't believe a word of it, Xaviere...you’re a wild and exacting soul. I love you. I want to sleep with you. Set in the fog-bound streets of London in 1952, She Came To Stay tells the story of Dina, a Greek Cypriot immigrant. Dina is working hard to build a better life, but when she meets the mysterious and alluring Bebba, Dina is forced on to a new and dangerous path. What follows is a dark and poignant tale about the adventures and dangers of life in a new country, and of friendship and family and what can happen when those bonds are tested to their limits. I took hold of the fringe. The gold tassels hung limply where the seam had come undone, but she’d also stepped on it and there was a rip. We both knew she would pay a double fine for this – a shilling for the damage and another for trying to hide it from Madame B. She Came to Stay is one of Simone de Beauvoir’s first published pieces of writing. This novel details the story of a tumultuous three-way relationship between Parisians Françoise and Pierre and a young woman from Rouen named Xavière. Françoise is a self-insert character based on Beauvoir and Pierre is based on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, complete with near quotations of many of the real life philosopher’s musings. She Came to Stay also touches on the lives and loves of two captivating secondary characters, Gerbert and Elisabeth, to the extent that their stories intertwine with those of the three main characters. Like essentially all of Beauvoir’s other work, She Came to Stay is an exercise in the existentialist worldview. Unlike some of Beauvoir’s later novels, however, She Came to Stay is deeply interior, and driven primarily by dialogue and emotion as opposed to action.

Xaviere is unspeakably manipulative, so it’s a testament to Francoise’s strength of will that she’s able to put up with her for longer than five minutes. The teenage strumpet goes above and beyond to drive a wedge between Francoise and Pierre, and for a good two-thirds of the novel she has them dancing on her strings. The narrative occasionally switches to third person, emerging from Bebba’s perspective. It is used to depict scenes in which Dina is absent, but often Bebba becomes just an alternative narrator when all three are present. Changing the narrator does not, in my opinion, add anything – we don’t learn much more about her and I was left to wonder what purpose there was to the change. I wanted to give you more than you were prepared to accept. And, if one is sincere, to give is a way of insisting on some return." No philosophical asides are thrust in, although the theme is straight from philosophy — and transferring philosophy to living people and scenes is the most difficult problem a writer may try. The vociferous male reviewers now may take a second look, this time at Simone de Beauvoir, novelist.When the university results came out, Sartre was ranked first and de Beauvoir second. Critical verdict There’s some timelessness to the broader themes, though. True to her reputation, de Beauvoir explored all kinds of existentialist philosophy, ideas of freedom, dependence, sexuality, and “the other”. If you’re not across your existentialist philosophising (hey, no judgement – it’d been a while for me, too!), it’s all about finding the self and the meaning of life through exploring the bounds of free will and personal responsibility. If those ideas grab you, then you’re going to want to give this book a go, because it’s got them all in spades. I absolutely loved it. A g ripping, enthralling story . . . I was completely engrossed' - Laura Marshall, bestselling author of Friend Request