In a phone interview from Paris, Le Bon de Beauvoir said she knew “The Inseparables” should eventually be published when she first read the manuscript in 1986, soon after Beauvoir’s death. “Other publishing priorities simply got in the way, which is why I’m just getting to her novels and short stories now,” she said. Beauvoir chose Le Bon de Beauvoir, a close confidante of hers for 26 years, as her literary executor, and legally adopted her in 1980 for the explicit purpose of ensuring the rights to her works would revert to her. Le Bon de Beauvoir plans to release more of Beauvoir’s unpublished fiction in the future, she said.

Image Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and Simone de Beauvoir at the Fête des Femmes in June 1973 in Vincennes, France. Credit... Collection of Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

Le Bon de Beauvoir is confident that “The Inseparables” is a fully formed work. “When she wrote it, in 1954, she had already honed her craft as a writer,” she said. A typed copy of the novel exists in addition to the handwritten manuscript, and Beauvoir didn’t tinker with either after 1954. “She destroyed some works that she was unhappy with,” Le Bon de Beauvoir said. “She didn’t destroy this one. About her papers, she told me, ‘You’ll do as you think is right.’”

The manuscript was kept at Le Bon de Beauvoir’s home along with a good chunk of the archives, though some of Beauvoir’s papers were donated to the National Library in Paris. Before preparing it for publication, she only ever granted access to “The Inseparables” to one scholar, the Beauvoir specialist Éliane Lecarme-Tabone.

“It was an amazing discovery,” Lecarme-Tabone wrote in an email interview. “We know that Simone de Beauvoir sometimes judges herself too harshly. It deserved to be seized on.”

Beauvoir had left the work untitled, so Le Bon de Beauvoir looked to the text itself for inspiration. The word “inseparable” is mentioned several times in relation to the central characters, modeled after Beauvoir and her friend Élisabeth Lacoin, known as Zaza.

Both born to bourgeois, Catholic families, they met at the age of 9, and shared dreams of independence and higher education at a time when women were discouraged from pursuing either. Zaza, the more overtly rebellious one, spurred on her friend, Beauvoir wrote in “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”: “It was only when I compared myself with Zaza that I bitterly deplored my banality.”