Kate Kirkpatrick and Cate Haste

Biographers Kate Kirkpatrick and Cate Haste reflect on the strong women at the centre of their latest works – the writer of the feminist bible Simone de Beauvoir and ‘the first celebrity’ Alma Mahler – and how they forged their own paths in life.

Beauvoir famously wrote ‘one is not born a woman, but becomes one’. Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A Life charts how the writer of The Second Sex became herself. She tackles the distortions that plagued de Beauvoir during her lifetime and after her death including over her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre. Kirkpatrick is a lecturer in religion, philosophy and culture at King’s College London and author of several books and articles on Sartre, Beauvoir, and French existentialism.

Haste’s Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler reappraises the life of one of the most controversial muses in history. Alma Mahler had marriages to the composer Gustav Mahler, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and the novelist, playwright and poet Franz Werfel. She was variously seen as cruel, vain, unreliable and as a femme-fatale. Haste finds a talented composer who was generous, creative and zealous in the pursuit of love. Haste’s previous books include Craigie Aitchison, Nazi Women, Clarissa Eden and, with Cherie Blair, The Goldfish Bowl.