[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 well as student is central to these tales. On the other hand, de Beauvoir had already removed herself morally and politically from the world she was describing—which may account for her harshness toward the heroines in some of these stories. Already, while teaching in the provinces, she and Sartre had been involved in a long and difficult triangle with one of de Beauvoir's students (the basis of L'invitée, her first published novel, translated into English as She Came to Stay). They had also been pulled into politics by the Spanish Civil War.

The common theme of these five stories, each of which has been given the name of its heroine, is the existentialist tragedy of placing essence before existence—that is, attempting to dispel the ambiguity and freedom of one's life by setting up an Absolute (God) or absolutes (social customs) on which one relies, making "things of the spirit come first." Some of the stories are roughly structured, while others are told without a complete command of that skill for transforming life and philosophy into art which de Beauvoir would beautifully master in her best fiction, The Mandarins. However, all five have an energy and rigor, an honesty of detail and a sense of hitting the bone of a story that are characteristic of de Beauvoir.

In "Chantal," a provincial schoolteacher adorns her mundane life with literary allusions and impresses her adolescent female students with her emancipated views. "'It's as though we were walking about in a Balzac novel, don't you think?'" she tells a student with whom she is taking a stroll through their little town, and she suggests to the girl that if she transforms an old beggar by the lycée into "'the incarnation of one of Goya's freaks he no longer seems repulsive but beautiful.'" The narrow caution of Chantal's vision is exposed, however, when her favorite student, whom she has helped to steal time with a boyfriend, becomes pregnant. Will Chantai help the girl procure an abortion? "'Certainly not,'" says Chantai indignantly. "'All Monique has to do is to marry as soon as possible; and if her parents have their wits about them the story will never be known.'"

In "Marcelle," one of the more autobiographical stories in a number of recognizable details, a girl turns from religion to social causes, still holding fast to what de Beauvoir would call the Absolute. "Marguerite" also draws on de Beauvoir's own youth: here a young woman attempts to experience the underworld of bars and prostitutes while holding onto her own bourgeois purity. In "Lisa," perhaps the most successful story, mysticism mixes with the budding sexuality of a young and vital boarding-school girl. The final scene, in which Lisa masturbates to a mixture of sentimental and religious images, is discomforting even today; it must have been quite shocking forty years ago.

The most intriguingly autobiographical story, though, is "Anne." The dutiful and loving daughter of a large and wealthy family, Anne is being groomed through sanctity and obedience for a proper marriage. Her sophisticated friend—a Chantai again—badgers Anne into following her own instincts and helps draw her to a breakdown and sudden death. Readers of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first volume of de Beauvoir's autobiography, will immediately think of Zaza, de Beauvoir's childhood friend who died suddenly at the age of 20 after a young man with whom she had fallen in love could not marry her. Zaza had vacillated between obeying her mother's wishes and following her own and de Beauvoir's vision of freedom and happiness. What distinguishes this telling from the version in Memoirs is the harsh attitude taken toward Chantai, the de Beauvoir figure, who is presented as self-dramatizing and narcissistic:

Chantai leant toward the fire. A great wave of emotion came over her; after all these weeks of sterile regret she suddenly felt that she had not been cheated at all: her course of action had failed and the future had not meekly obeyed her, but in return she had been given a past . . . from now on her life would always bear the burden of a beautiful and tragic tale. . . . Chantal's head bowed lower. This wonderful burden weighed heavy on her heart: she could not yet foresee all the wealth it would bring her, but already she felt transfigured by its presence.

Those who wish can read de Beauvoir's characteristically unsparing evaluation of these early stories in the second volume of her memoirs, The Prime of Life, where she uses such adjectives as "bloodless" and "labored."

Yet the tales are always interesting and, even in their harshness, pleasing. English language readers should be glad to have them translated. They describe a claustrophobic world of repression that is difficult for most liberally raised Americans to comprehend. More than her other fiction, more even than Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the stories show the refined brutality of Catholic schoolgirl society. They give a window on the closed universe out of which de Beauvoir thrust herself to live her unconventional and politically committed life.