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The Second SexBy Simone de Beauvoir Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier Jonathan Cape, 822pp. £30

A PAPERBACK COPY of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, with the blue and white Matisse collage on the cover, adorned the bookshelves of most women interested in feminism in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1953 on, when it was first published in English translation, the book sold millions of copies, and generated controversy, admiration and loathing, as it had when originally published in French in 1949. But were its Anglophone readers getting the full Second Sex? It seems not, and this deficiency is now remedied by an unabridged new English translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two American-born translators living in Paris.