Olga is also the inspiration for the character Ivich in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom novels.

She had made her theatrical debut two years earlier as Electra in Sartre’s play The Flies.

Getty Images also has this rather striking photo of her in The Flies, though dated to 1951 ––

One of the characters was played by Olga Dominique (née Kosakiewicz).

She and her sister Wanda are the inspiration for the character Xavière in Beauvoir’s novel L’Invitée (She Came To Stay).

Getty Images has a publicity photo for the original production featuring her and Jean Berger ––

In a besieged medieval town faced with starvation, the (all male) council decide that food should be reserved for soldiers and workers — so denied to women, children, and elderly men.

It is Beauvoir’s only play.

For this reason, The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy does not include this confusing attempt to introduce existentialism.

It has instead Beauvoir’s much more coherent and focused essay ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’, published just a few weeks after Sartre’s lecture took place.

Sartre regretted publishing it. The book is overly technical in some places, under-motivated in others, and clearly inconsistent overall. It is not much less chaotic than the circumstances it was composed in.

Even so, someone managed to take comprehensive notes, which were edited into a transcript.

The resulting publication became one of the best selling and most widely translated philosophy books of the twentieth century -- its most recent English title is Existentialism Is a Humanism.

The event was chaotic. Chairs were broken. People fainted and had to be carried outside.

The discussion was cut short for the sake of public safety.

This made its reputation as the defining event of the existentialist offensive.

Sources:

The Iris Murdoch archive at the University of Kingston for the notebook. Thank you to Lucy Bolton for the photo.

Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-45, edited by Peter J. Conradi for the letter.

I wish I knew more of German philosophy. Have you read Nietzsche & Schopenhauer & those boys? I begin to think that, as far as ethics is concerned, their great big mistakes are worth infinitely more than the colour-less finicky liberalism of our Rosses & Cook Wilsons.”

I begin to like his ideas more & more ... his writing and talking on morals – will, liberty, choice – is hard & lucid & invigorating. It’s the real thing – so exciting, & so sobering, to meet at last – after turning away in despair from the shallow stupid milk & water ‘ethics’ of English ‘moralists’

A week later Murdoch wrote in a letter ––

"Last week I had a great experience. I met Jean Paul Sartre. He was in Brussels to lecture on existentialism, & I was introduced to him at a small gathering after the lecture, & met him again at a long café seance the following day ...

(Women first voted in French municipal elections on 29 April 1945.)

Two chapters of the projected fourth and final novel in the series were published in Les Temps Modernes in 1949, but the book was never finished.

Fragments of the book were gathered together in a posthumous edition of Sartre’s novels.

They are available in English as The Last Chance.

It will be followed two months later by Le Sursis (The Reprieve) …

… and then four years later by La Mort dans l’Âme (Iron in the Soul).

The BBC broadcast a superb thirteen-episode TV adaptation of the first three novels in 1970.

Agnès Poirier tells the story of the journal’s first year here: