Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

The author of The Second Sex may be known as the mother of French feminism, but that’s just about the only maternal thing about Simone de Beauvoir. Freed from the confinement of marriage by her family’s inability to provide a dowry, she rejected religion as a teenager and eventually fell in with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist crowd. He and Beauvoir maintained one of the most revolutionary relationships of their time. Although she refused his marriage proposal in 1931 and the couple never cohabited, they remained lovers and trusted colleagues until his death five decades later. While each was the other’s primary partner, both were open about their affairs, and sometimes they shared girlfriends. And if, for some reason, that isn’t enough to qualify Beauvoir as a bad girl, kindly recall that she also knew how to take a sexy photo.

(From Flavorwire’s 10 Legendary Bad Girls of Literature)