A Life in Letters

The first complete English-language collection of Simone Weil’s letters to her loved ones, A Life in Letters deepens appreciation of one of the twentieth century’s great thinkers by offering insight into her relationships, spiritual and occupational experiments, political commitments, restless mobility, and wide-ranging interests.

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English. Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows. Assembled here, the letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. A scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures. The first complete collection of Simone Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters vividly illustrates her thought taking shape as she joins the Spanish struggle against fascism and the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, providing an ideal entryway into Weil’s treasured body of writing.