SOURCE: "Suffering Sisterhood," in Saturday Review, Vol. LII, No. 8, February 22, 1969, pp. 45, 79.

In the following assessment of the collection The Woman Destroyed, Culligan briefly comments on the theme of suffering in the novellas.

Truer words were never written than those on the jacket of Simone de Beauvoir's new book. This trio of novellas is indeed "a masterpiece of feminine suffering," although it should be understood that the operative words are the ultimate and penultimate units of the phrase.

To some readers, of course, the achievement may be more liability than asset. Because the erudite historian of "the second sex" is notoriously free from levity, ironic intention seems unlikely, although the insensitivity of each narrator to her human environment verges on caricature. The first suspects her husband of indifference and her son of betraying her values, but after a prolonged siege of self-pity she grudgingly accepts these erosions. The second...