Simone Weil

(Penguin Lives series). Daughter of a secular Jewish family who yearned to enter the Catholic Church, Weil produced a complex and intense body of writing, her tremendous intellectual legacy foreshadowing many of the twentieth century'schanges, and continuing to influence religious thought to the present day. This subtle and compelling biography illuminates this enigmatic figure and proto-feminist whose life was marked by both passion and pathos. (Weil died at age 34after a long struggle with anorexia). 246p.