[In the following review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, Bair briefly outlines the merits, flaws, and overall significance of Beauvoir's stories.]

These stories, written during the years 1935-37, when Miss de Beauvoir was between the ages of 27 and 29, appear at an appropriate time. An exploration of her entire canon and its impact is long overdue and particularly timely today, when many of the spheres of intellectual thought and political activism in which she played a seminal role are undergoing major shifts: for example, the feminist movement, which is clearly seeking redefinition and new impetus.

Simone de Beauvoir is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist theoreticians and intellectuals of our time. Her fiction has had both critical and commercial success in many languages, and her nonfiction has thoroughly documented her beliefs as a political activist. Her influence has been felt in areas ranging from philosophical inquiry to pacifism. Her conceptualization of the status of women in The Second Sex preceded every other contemporary work on the subject of women and 33 years after its publication still powerfully affects the international women's movement. Her relationship of more than 50 years with the late Jean-Paul Sartre placed her at the center of the philosophical circle that made Existentialism so significant in the mid-20th century.

The five stories in this book were written after Miss de Beauvoir had abandoned several complete and partly complete early writings that were never offered for publication because of what she called "shoddy romanticism." She wrote this book when she was already involved with Sartre and was teaching in the provinces, away from Paris, her family and friends, at a time when her own life was undergoing the extreme changes so eloquently recorded in the second volume of her memoirs, The Prime of Life.

She had already decided that fiction should be her means of expression and to this end began experimenting with short texts that fictionalized her own experiences as well as those of other women. In the five stories that each bear the name of a single woman, she wrote about five different approaches along as many different paths toward the discovery of the same personal truths. To further unify the stories, she chose a theme reflected in her first title for the book, Primaute du spirituel (The Ascendancy of the Spirit). When she discovered that Jacques Maritain had already used this title, she changed it slightly to Quand prime le spirituel (When Things of the Spirit Come First).

Although the five stories are independent entities, the leading characters of some appear as background figures in the others. All the stories deal with the harm done to young women by the excessive religiosity that dominates their backgrounds and constricts the marital and educational opportunities and possibilities of behavior open to them. In the preface to the book, written some 40 years after the stories themselves, Miss de Beauvoir describes this as "the dangerous influence of that kind of spiritual life" and speaks of her desire to "tell their (the women's) stories and also to deal with my own conversion to the real world."

These are stories of young women in the process of defining what they want to be; of their youthful attempts to break free of familial, social and religious restraints, to learn to respect themselves as well as to love others, to come to terms with commitments either freely chosen or else imposed, and to dare to flaunt social convention. Miss de Beauvoir writes about the undefinable feelings that presage the first youthful discovery of femininity and concurrent passion. She writes of role models who no longer serve, of friends who disappoint, of men who behave, quite simply, as themselves.

When placed within historical context—the bourgeois French society of the early part of this century—these stories can be read as accurate reflections of that culture, portraying a suffocating insularity requiring great courage for undereducated women to rail against. It is this emotional toll that Miss de Beauvoir conveys so successfully. Despite certain failures of style, there is a realistic cast to these stories that makes the situation of the women tangible. One can almost smell the garbage spilling out of the too-small pail that it is Marguerite's duty to carry down five flights each evening after dinner, and one lurches along in the overcrowded Metro with Marcelle, who sometimes feels so sick "that she was often compelled to get out and finish the journey on foot."

The stories have not been published exactly in the order in which Miss de Beauvoir wrote them: They appear as "Marcelle" (written second, originally entitled "Renee"), "Chantai" (third), "Lisa" (first), "Anne" (fourth) and "Marguerite" (fifth). Her decision to rearrange them is correct because this allows the book to begin and end with women who are spirited and interesting, possessing by far the most intelligence and vitality. With "Chantai" and "Anne" she takes deliberate stylistic risks that for the most part succeed. "Lisa," the weakest in terms of content, gets buried in the middle so that its conventional predictability is mitigated by its placement. "This book is a beginner's piece of work," Miss de Beauvoir writes in the preface, with "obvious faults," and "Lisa" comes closest to fitting this judgment.

"Chantai" begins splendidly with the diary of the provincial teacher who romanticizes her dull life, but it disintegrates when Miss de Beauvoir seems unable to decide whose point of view the narrator should embrace. "Anne" is the author's first attempt to write about her friend, Elizabeth Mabille, the "Zaza" of her memoirs. She begins with a dramatic monologue in which Anne's mother prays at Sunday Mass, rambling through pride, self-abasement, self-evasion, willfulness and vengeance. Miss de Beauvoir then moves smoothly on to scenes of French family life on summer holiday, but the story drifts into jargon once Anne reaches the point at which she must make important decisions about her life. The final outcome, though true to Miss de Beauvoir's life, seems contrived when fictionalized.

"Marcelle" and "Marguerite," are stories about two sisters. Marcelle is moody, bright and "extraordinarily sensitive." Her desire is "to live with a man of genius" and be "his companion," for when she is "in the company of these intellectuals she felt rich with a mysterious femininity." She insists upon a disastrous marriage and perceives very early that "life always fell short of dreams." Just as willfully, she insists that solitude and suffering will form a higher calling than happiness. "I am a woman of genius," she proclaims, and we believe her.

"Marguerite," which Miss de Beauvoir calls "a satire on my youth," is the most openly autobiographical of the stories and the one whose details will be most recognizable to readers of the memoirs. This "little bourgeoise trying to act the bohemian" triumphs over religious and familial crises and ends with her explanation of how she came to "try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready made values. I had to rediscover everything myself, and sometimes it was disconcerting—furthermore, not everything is clear even now."

The importance of this book today lies in its demonstration of how early in her career Simone de Beauvoir recognized and expressed the ideas that would figure throughout her writing, particularly the question of the forces that determine women's lives. Recently she remarked that she would write no more fiction, nor would she publish any early works other than this one. She feels that her canon is complete and "one book more or less will not change anyone's opinion about the body of my work."

Her last fiction published before this was The Woman Destroyed, a collection of three stories about older women who are made vulnerable to suffering by old age, loneliness and the loss of love. Now, with this book about five young women, we have the perfect set of bookends to enclose a remarkable lifetime of writing.