SOURCE: "Lisa & Marcelle & Anne & Chantai," in The Nation, Vol. 235, No. 10, October 2, 1982, pp. 314-15.

Below, Ascher comments on the existentialist elements connecting Beauvoir's stories.

In 1937, shortly before she turned 30, Simone de Beauvoir began a group of loosely linked short stories set in the restrictive, bourgeois, Catholic, largely female Parisian environment of her childhood and youth. She borrowed her title from Jacques Maritain's metaphysical essays, Primauté du spirituel (The ascendancy of the spirit)—"somewhat ironically," as she said, since she had come to despise all spirituality for placing a web over reality and crushing life. The collection was not published in France until 1979, under the altered title Quand prime le spirituel, and it has taken three years more to cross the Atlantic.

The stories were written while she and Sartre were teaching philosophy in lycées in Paris; and lycée life from the point of view of teacher as...