In the conclusion to her book on Kristeva, Sara Beardsworth (2004a) takes Kristeva's 1980s trilogy to task for failing to explore how lives are made. This fault is said to originate in a gap between Kristeva's emphasis on art on the one hand, and on therapy on the other. While both art and therapy are said to constitute distinctive responses to the crisis experienced by modern subjects, they fail to elucidate, Beardsworth suggests, how people make lives. This gap, according to Beardsworth, is filled with Kristeva's genius trilogy, whose linkage between life and narrative, and whose focus on the exemplarity of genius, provide answers to the problem of crisis that have occupied Kristeva in much of her work since the 1980s. Thus, it is in yet another trilogy, on female genius, that the concept of life, and in particular the connection between life and discourse, take centre-stage.

The lives explored in the genius trilogy are no ordinary lives, though. They encompass three prominent female intellectuals of the twentieth century: the German–Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt; the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, also German–Jewish; and the French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. What connects these three books, and with it the lives and writings of the women who are under discussion there, is the notion of genius.