SOURCE: A review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 1982, p. 814.

In her laudatory estimation of Beauvoir's stories, Duchêne observes Beauvoir's attack of bourgeois society in the collection.

Simone de Beauvoir has always been a very economical writer as well as a prolix one, and used all her experience twice: once as material for her lengthy memoirs, and again as material for her usually lengthy fictions. With these "five early tales", written in the mid-1930s, in her own late twenties (the original title, La Primauté du Spirituel, was "ironically borrowed" from Maritain; the present translations, by Patrick O'Brian, are very happy ones) she takes economy one stage further, by discussing them, in a Preface, in the same words as she used when describing them in the second volume of her memoirs, La Force de l'Age, in 1960. Thus increasing for...