The Complete Essays (M.A. Screech translation)

Montaigne's misogyny draws the sharpest fire across reviews: one reader calls it “so misogynistic that it's laughable,” and his dismissiveness toward women sits next to the modern-sounding passages without apology. A recurring critical reading holds him a conservative defender of the status quo dressed up as a free thinker, since he writes as “a man with the money, land, estates, status and power” and never seriously questions that position. Where fans hear radical self-portraiture, detractors hear vanity, the first person tipping into something pompous, and at least one reader finds the philosophy thin once the charm is stripped away, calling it “unsurprising and, I admit, superficial and somewhat pedestrian.” 'An Apology for Raymond Sebond,' running past a hundred pages, gets named the hardest, most exhausting stretch, and the sheer length of the complete text means some readers take years to finish it.