Simone de Beauvoir's Daily Routine

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher and novelist whose book The Second Sex (1949) became a founding text of modern feminism. Her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. She split her day into two blocks of work with a long social break in the middle.

She told The Paris Review in 1965 that she had tea first, got under way at about 10:00 AM and worked until 1:00 PM. Then she saw her friends, went back to work at 5:00 PM and kept going until 9:00 PM, and picking up the thread in the afternoon was no trouble. Her studio in Montparnasse was a 5-minute walk from the apartment of Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong companion. The Marginalian collects her lines on the routine; she worked every day except for 2 or 3 months of travel a year.

It's for anyone who works best in two shifts and doesn't want to give up their people for it: 7 hours of work and 4 free hours in the middle of the day. Her wake time, meals, the late evening and bedtime are our estimates.