2001, Viking Penguin

In "Simone Weil", du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of a complex and intriguing figure. A patriot, a mystic, and activist, a pampered intellectual who believed in the redemptive value of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, the daughter of a secular Jewish family who yearned to enter the Catholic Church, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous legacy foreshadowed many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence religious thought today. Du Plessix Gray's biography traces Weil's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher, as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. This subtle and compelling biography illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience.

"You can hardly blame Gray for her occasional irritation with her brilliant, maddening subject. She ends this absorbing biography with quotations about Weil's legacy from admirers (and some detractors) -- as if unable to quite formulate a verdict of her own. "
Laura Miller, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Gray is a wise and compassionate Virgil to the bewildered reader who chances upon this transfixing, even seductive inferno (or purgatory, or heaven—the boundaries blur) of largely self-imposed pain. She clarifies the gradual transition in Weil's life from left-wing political activism to world-renouncing spirituality, and critiques what she sees as "priggish" and "perverse" tendencies in Weil's moral idealisms, from her Francophile fervors to her gnostic anti-Judaism. The result is a virtuosic achievement, possibly unique among popular treatments of Weil: a short, measured biography of a short but startlingly unmeasured and unmeasuring life."
Publisher's Weekly

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