[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 initiates the sense, welcome or irritating, that they relate to Holy Writ.

Certainly, they all relate very directly to that body of experience on which her writings have conferred something like mythological significance. In the 1960 memoirs she described (a bit more fully than in this 1981 Preface) how they were written when she abandoned two rather high-flown attempts on the novel and decided instead to concentrate on her own experience, the better to convey her "horror of bourgeois society". All five stories, about five young women, explore the operation of la mauvaise foi, and the damage done when people, under the influence of religion or society, cannot understand their own motives for thinking and acting as they do.

The best is probably "Chantai", based on a young woman teacher encountered by the author when she herself was sent, on the quasi-military French system of rewards, to teach at Rouen. Chantai affects enormous sensibility and emancipation, but is unable to hear the appeals made to her by two favourite students; one of them has her life thereby ruined, and the other is deeply and dangerously wounded. The dimension given here by Chantal's own diary adds to our sense of what the author calls—in 1960, and again in 1981—"that distance between a person and himself which is the essence of bad faith".

The other stories explore the same distance, in a relentlessly detailed and direct way, with no inhibitions about concealing their "message". Sometimes the distance is self-imposed—as in "Marcelle", where a young woman disposed to do good works in order to think well of herself disastrously marries a young man whom she thinks she can help to become a poet—and sometimes it is imposed by others, as in "Anne", an early version of a history which haunts the memoirs, about Zaza, known and dear to the author, who was driven to madness and death by a dire conjunction of bien-pensant mother and bien-pensant fiancé. "Lisa" describes, flatly and poignantly, a day-spent seeking love, and also at the dentist's—in the life of a young girl marooned in the kind of exalted religious educational institution the author had herself undergone. And "Marguerite" is autobiographical, "a satire on my youth", about a girl's staunchly fighting conformity until she can "look the world in the face" and rejoice in its "naked, living and inexhaustible" facts. The author has a special affection for it: "I wrote it in a lively style, and with a fellow-feeling for the heroine", she recalls (in both 1960 and 1981).

Stories written, then, from a youthful will to écraser l'infâme, with all their claustrophobic detail drawn from personal experience; honourable, and also—this is not the first epithet that suggests itself when one thinks of this formidable mentor—endearing. We still have our Chantals and our Marcelles among us, after all, and should salute more respectfully than we sometimes do the author's lifelong work of excoriation; and at the same time it is endearingly entertaining to note that whereas the dust-jacket quotes the author as feeling "affection" for the stories ("which shed light on the genesis of my work as a writer"—as if one could ever doubt this, having read her!) her Preface finds the collection has "merit" ("enough for me to wish to see it published"). I look forward to the day when we can all appreciate the staunchness of her opposition, and simultaneously celebrate the velleities of her stolid narcissism.