The lawyer and politician on the legendary French feminist

AS A student I developed a great interest in Simone de Beauvoir. Not only was she a famous intellectual, philosopher, writer and marxist feminist, but she was also French. This was a combination of enormous appeal to anyone newly embarked upon a university career, with a passion for going on student demos and a fondness for late night political discussions fuelled by cheap wine.

In the late 1980s, that grim period of high unemployment and low political excitement, we were desperate for glamour in Dublin student circles, so my friends and I immersed ourselves in the writings and political campaigns of the French existentialists. Even the word 'existential', the exact meaning of which escaped most of us, conveyed a sense of the Parisian intellectual glamour for which we longed!

In those circumstances, de Beauvoir and her long-term lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, were the epitome of coolness for us. We became very familiar with their life stories, diligently reading and dissecting their many publications. We even went inter-railing around France carrying various significant texts, and visiting all their old haunts in Paris and the Riviera.

They had met studying philosophy at the Sorbonne university in Paris in the 1920s, and both became well-known as writers around the same time. He published Being and Nothingness, his most famous book setting out the key features of existentialist philosophy, the same year that she published her novel She Came to Stay (1943).

Of the two, I prefer de Beauvoir's far more readable book.

It is a fascinating fictionalised account of the disruption of her love for Sartre by the intrusion of a third person, the unwanted guest of the title, a character actually based upon a younger female student of de Beauvoir's, with whom both she and Sartre had relationships in real life.

A few years later, in 1949, de Beauvoir published her best-known work, The Second Sex, now seen as heralding the second-wave feminist movement. In it, she writes highly perceptively about how society constructs the relations between women and men, describing how girls are conditioned from an early age to see themselves always as secondary to boys. She concludes famously that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." The book was extremely controversial at the time, as it challenged the prevailing wisdom that women's natural place was in the home . . . but it has since become one of the most important feminist writings of the last century. It remains relevant today, with its liberating message of free choice, that women do not have to fit any sort of naturally ordained role.

De Beauvoir's own life certainly challenged convention. She never married Sartre, nor had any children; they mostly lived apart, but they were always together, with a social life centred around Parisian cafes. Both became heavily involved in leftwing politics and anti-colonial campaigns, and together with a group of like-minded radical friends, edited a political journal for many years. De Beauvoir recounts that they remained true soulmates until Sartre's death in 1980 (she died six years later).

AHer passionate feelings for him come across very strongly, especially in her autobiographical books. I only came across this series of books after reading her better known texts, and found them very evocative in describing the fascinating and complex life she led. They begin with an account of her childhood, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and continue with detailed descriptions of the years when her career was at its peak (The Coming of Age; The Prime of Life), through to a most poignant book about the death of her mother (A Very Easy Death) and the even more moving Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, which documents their relationship, and her enduring love for Sartre, in his final years.

At the age of 18, I thought she presented an idyllic vision of a life revolving around a group of like-minded radical friends, dominated by political discussion, writing and activism, without any domestic baggage, but with the necessary romance of this powerful and enduring relationship.

I hope that there are still 18-year olds out there, diligently reading those books, fantasising about having a relationship with a young Sartre, and dreaming of a life lived in the heady atmosphere of Paris cafe society!