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Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the first female graduates of the Ecole Normale Superieure and taught philosophy in provincial schools from 1931 to 1938. A socialist, she worked for a time on the Renault assembly line and volunteered to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Rachel Bespaloff (1895-1949) published essays in the 1930s about Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Andre Malraux, and Julien Green, among others. In 1942, she left France for the United States, where she worked as a scriptwriter for the French Section of the Office of War Information before teaching French literature at Mount Holyoke.
"""* 'The publication of Simone Weil's essay... [was] an event of great importance to those of us who read it. This is one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written' Elizabeth Hardwick * 'This book is about the best thing I have ever read on the art of Homer, and unless you have tasted the poem in Greek, Mme. Bespaloff will serve better than the translations to convey how distant, how refined an art it was' Robert Fitzgerald * 'Weil's 'The Iliad, or The Poem of Force' and Bespaloff's 'On the Iliad' remain the twentieth century's most beloved, tortured, and profound responses to the world's greatest and most disturbing poem' The Atlantic Monthly"""
