Simone

Simone Weil

“The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced.” Simone Weil — the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer — was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of essays and letters and filled several notebooks with reflections. Hellman’s volume sets out the single world view — with its paradoxes and its logics — which appear behind her disparate writings but which she never lived to set out formally herself. Hellman extracts the key themes in Weil’s writings on Marxism, Hitlerism, factory work, history, and religion, in an effort to examine the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in her fusion of deep spirituality and commitment to the poor and oppressed and her love-hate relationship with Roman Catholicism and Israel. The result is a synthesis of her thought as a whole, drawn principally from her varied, fragmentary writings, and seen in relation to her life and personality.

Simone's Letters

When ten-year-old Simone starts writing letters to Jem Cakebread, the leading man of a touring theatre company, she begins a friendship that will change her life...and the lives of all around her; her mum, her best friend Chloe, her new friend Melanie - and not forgetting Jem himself!This collection of funny and often touching letters charts Simone's final year at primary school; from a visit to Rumplestiltskin's Revenge to her final leaving assembly; through the ups and downs of her friendships - and those of her mum and dad.

House documents