Simone Weil (pronounced "vey") [1909–1943] was born in Paris, and she was the younger sister of mathematician André Weil. Her ancestry was Jewish, but Simone and André were raised agnostic. Weil excelled from a young age, becoming proficient at Ancient Greek at 12. She came second in her class at the École Normale Supérieure, ahead of Simone de Beauvoir in third place....

...In 1931, Weil became a school teacher, a profession she practiced in between punishing stints at factories and farms, designed to increase empathy with the working class. Though she considered herself a pacifist, in 1936 she joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. However, her clumsiness repeatedly put her corps at risk; finally she suffered serious burns which caused her to leave Spain and travel to Assisi to recuperate. Here Weil experienced a series of mystical encounters with Christ. She was attracted to Roman Catholicism but refused baptism, fearing that the consolations of organised religion would impair her faith.

During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from a Dominican friar. In 1942, she travelled to the USA and afterwards to the UK. In London, she became a French Resistance worker. Her health had always been frail, and the punishing work regime she assumed for the Resistance soon took its toll. In 1943 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and maintain a generous diet. However, the idealism which had always informed Weil's political activism and material detachment did not permit her to accept special treatment. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she swore off sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. Twenty-eight years later, Weil limited herself to the rations she imagined her compatriots were subjected to in the occupied territories of France. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England. She died in August 1943, surrounded by a few devoted friends.

Most of her work was published posthumously. (from Wikipedia.com)

Her published work includes La Pesanteur et la Grace (Gravity and Grace) (1947), L'Enracinement (The Need for Roots) (1949), Attente de Dieu (Waiting on God) (1950), and Oppression et Liberté (Oppression and Liberty) (1955).

"Simone Weil, arguably one of the most formidable French thinkers and writers of the 1930's and 1940's yet largely under-appreciated...was a classicist, early anti-colonialist, scientist, mythologist, proto-feminist and trade union activist whose contributions have hardly been acknowledged on either side of the Atlantic. ...Weil's life and work [are] undergoing renewed interest in France, where her Complete Works are being published in their entirety...

A woman of intense compassion and conviction, yet overshadowed by male counterparts such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, Weil was a trade union activist on behalf of workers in France and New York, a brilliant political theorist, a major intellectual figure of the far-left and ultimately, a Christian mystic. She died in 1943 at age 34 from tuberculosis complicated by her refusal to eat more than Hitler was rationing to her countrymen in occupied France. During her brief life she contributed important ideas about the nature of technology and the mechanisms of social oppression, the limits of political ideology, Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism, Christian and Jewish mysticism, masochism and feminism.

After receiving her baccalauréat with honors at age 15, Weil studied philosophy for four years, then entered the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1928, from which she graduated in 1931. She contributed many articles to socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until poor health forced her to abandon the effort.

Born Jewish, she became strongly attracted in 1940 to Christianity, believing that Christ on the Cross was a bridge between God and man, and became a practicing Roman Catholic....

During her brief life, Weil made an indelible impression on some of Europe's leading political philosophers. Wearing her customary burlap sack, she met with Trotsky and disagreed with him, as she did with Georges Bataille. Albert Camus recognized her inflexible logic and acute lucidity as a "madness for truth," while acknowledging her as the "only great spirit of our time."

Twenty-five years before Hannah Arendt, Weil denounced the "bureaucratic phenomenon" that had turned both Russia and Germany into totalitarian states. She deeply identified with the workers on the assembly-line, joined them in the factory and started her long march toward Catholicism, which she came to view as the religion of the workers.

In 1942 she and her family fled Nazi-occupied France for New York and lived from July through November at 549 Riverside Drive near Columbia [University]. It was there that she completed some of her mystical notebooks. Her New York notebooks became, with her London journals, Weil's final book: The Supernatural Knowledge, published by Albert Camus in 1950." (from Columbia News website)