FROM THE PUBLISHER

Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909, Strikingly beautiful and intellectually precocious. Francine du Plessix Grany's stirring portrait of this brilliant and profoundly passionate woman chronicles her life from her early days as a nonconformist left-wing student, her work as a union organiser and an unskilled factory laborer, to her anarchist fight against Spain during the Spanish Civil War and her work with the French Resistance.

Gray also charts Weil's fascinating psychological and physiological development, her love of Christianity, her overwhelming physical struggles with anorexia and exhaustion, and the incredibly powerful spirit which drove her until she died, aged just 34.