The Absent Presence of War in She Came to Stay

Abstract Accounting for the absent presence of war in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel She Came to Stay , this article argues that Beauvoir’s literary aesthetic for engaged literature suggests the novel may be read as an existentialist protest novel evoking a collective act of resistance. War drives the action, embeds the individual in a situation of general tragedy, and demands a conversion that blends personal history with collective history. The absent presence of war suggests reading beyond the tortured love story.