[In the following assessment of When Things of the Spirit Come First, the critic finds Beauvoir's stories immature but significant for the light they shed on "both the difficulties of the young writer and her eventual achievement"]

The information on the cover, which indicates that this is the author's first book and that it is a novel, is somewhat misleading on two counts. In La Force de l'âge, summarizing her early literary attempts, she writes, "J'avais écrit deux longs romans dont les premiers chapitres tenaient à peu près debout mais qui dégénéraient ensuite en un informe fatras. Je résolus cette fois de composer des récits assez brefs et de les mener d'un bout à l'autre avec rigueur" (p. 229). These five récits, composed between 1935 and 1937, she grouped under the ironic title, borrowed from Maritain, "Primauté du spirituel," modified for the present publication. The volume is, therefore, neither her first novel nor a novel but rather long stories concerning different characters, among whom there are ties of family or friendship and who thus move in the same milieu: "Entre les personnages de mes diverses nouvelles, j'établis des liens plus ou moins lâches mais chacun formait un tout complet" (p. 230). The texts are not arranged in order of composition but rather according to the chronology of the characters' relationships.

The manuscript was rejected by both Gallimard and Grasset, although, as Beauvoir notes, Sartre found numerous passages good. One must recognize, as the author does now, that the work is immature for several reasons, some of which she notes in her Preface: absence of fleshed-out male characters, awkward social satire, failure to convey sufficiently either her own drama or that of "Anne," the Zaza of Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. She could have observed also the excessive and somewhat unconvincing naïveté of the characters, the near-absence of scenic presentation (as opposed simply to summary) in several long passages, weaknesses of structure, and other technical flaws. Clearly, then, this publication is intended, not to bring to light a work of considerable literary merit, but to afford scholars and the author's admirers a chance to assess her early fiction and thus appreciate more both the difficulties of the young writer and her eventual achievement. It is a companion to a forthcoming volume of Beauvoir's other early writings.

The volume offers yet another view of the hated bourgeoisie, which, from her earliest writings, Simone de Beauvoir criticized, even if she was not yet ready to propose substitute values. The depiction would seem caricatural, were it not for the verification afforded by her autobiography. The text is characterized also by romanticism and idealism, which, although the author tried to rid herself of them, persist not only in the critical portraits but also in the dominant ethic of rebellion and self-affirmation, as well as in the style. In both ways this work is a complement to and in some ways a rough draft of both her memoirs and part of her fiction. As one would expect, since she wanted to write about what she knew, it is partly autobiographical. The title characters of all five stories are feminine. Marguerite, who speaks in the first person, experiences the same rebellion and loss of faith as the author; many episodes are borrowed from her life without change, especially in the section where Marguerite explores night life and tries to be disponible. The portrait of Anne is intended to be a major study in the destructiveness of rigid Catholic middle-class morality; it is moving, but less convincing than the account of Zaza's dilemma and death in the memoirs. Chantai, whose story occupies the longest section and includes a diary, represents to some degree the author but more so a colleague who exemplified bad faith, that is, unconscious hypocrisy.

This volume will interest specialists (on Beauvoir, women writers in France, and the French bourgeoisie); it is much less polished, however, than Beauvoir's later writings, thus demonstrating that one can learn to write: she did.