Simone Weil

Born in Paris in 1909 to an Alsatian Jewish family, Simone Weil taught intermittently through the 1930s, breaking often for health and activism. She joined the anarchist Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War and worked twelve months as a labourer in car factories to grasp working-class life from within. As the decade turned, she grew more religious and mystical in her thinking. By 1943 she was in Britain with the Free French government in exile, restricting her food intake to match rations in Nazi-occupied France. She died of heart failure that August, at 34. Her writings drew little notice…