[In the following review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, Annan discusses how the stories reflect Beauvoir's values.]

These five linked stories about five young women make a French version of The Group, class of 1927 or thereabouts. If they had not been waiting over 40 years for publication one might think that Madame de Beauvoir was consciously and quite legitimately treading in Mary McCarthy's footsteps. Unfortunately, her book is not nearly so entertaining as its American counterpart. It is no use expecting humour from Madame de Beauvoir, though in fact she does produce one joke: one of the girls has a series of passes made at her in cinemas, bars and shops without ever realising what is going on. That is the advantage of a Christian upbringing,' she later concludes; 'I might have let myself be raped without thinking there was any harm in it.'

A Christian upbringing is what the book is all about, or rather against: all five stories are cautionary tales showing what damage it can do to body and soul. Anne, the most attractive of the girls, is torn between love for Pascal and love for her mother, who wants her to stop seeing him. This second love is reinforced by Anne's religious training which has conditioned her to obedience. The result is a somewhat Victorian-sounding brain fever; eventually it carries her off. Though heartbroken, her mother accepts her suffering and is able to see herself as God's instrument in helping her daughter attain a kind of sainthood. Pascal remains passive throughout. He is both wet and dry: a dry stick rustling the pages of learned books and wet in that he takes no initiative about life itself. All the men in the book are either drips or villians, occasionally both.

Pascal's elder sister, Marcelle, also succumbs to a psychosomatic ailment after an unsatisfactory marriage to a young boy—a dazzlingly attractive layabout who sees himself as a second Rimbaud. Masochism, it seems, is the inevitable result of a Catholic childhood; Marcelle finds herself humiliated by her irresistible sexual impulse, while Madame de Beauvoir says: 'I had fun drawing a picture of piety gradually shading off into shameless appetite.'

The repressive teaching of the Church is embodied in the Institution Saint-Ange, a girls' school like the one the author described in her autobiography: indeed there is so much autobiographical material in these stories that one wonders why she needed to dig them up when she had said it all in Memoires d'une Jeune Fille Rangée. The school prepares the daughters of the Catholic bourgeoisie—for marriage, preferably; but failing that, at least to climb the rungs of the French educational ladder until they become agrégées and qualified to undertake the formation of other good Catholic girls. There is an upper tier of older girls boarded free of charge in order to pursue the necessary studies at, but not of, the intellectually and morally dangerous Sorbonne. Their services enable the Institution to run with gratifying economy.

One of these Lucy Snowes is Lisa. She seems less a victim of Catholicism than of the French educational system with its tyranny of competitive examinations. 'What a barbarous activity it was,' she thinks in her chair at the Bibliothèque Nationale, 'using one's brain as though it were a machine for grinding knowledge that has nothing to do with life itself.' The nearest she gets to any kind of sensuous or sensual experience is to sink into the dentist's comfortable reclining chair and feel his fat soft hand against her cheek. Back at the school the girls are all resigned to their lot: Ten o'clock. Now all the students were alone, each in her cell.' There is nothing for poor Lisa but masturbation.

Soul-destroying though it is, at least the Institution is in Paris. Among the miseries of the teaching career is the young agrégé's inevitable exile to the provinces. Chantai is sent to Rougemont (Rouen) for her first posting. In her diary she romanticises herself and her situation: 'I have arranged my beloved books in my cupboard, my dear and inseparable companions Proust, Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, Dusty Answer, and Le Grand Meaulnes . . .'. No list could be more conventionally avant-garde for Chantal's period, but she sees herself as a genuine rebel. However, when she has to deal with a real-life situation—a pregnant pupil—she sides with convention. Meanwhile she has enjoyed feeling her intellectual power over the girls in her class who admire her fashionable clothes and fashionable ideas in almost equal measure—except for Andrée: she carries Madame de Beauvoir's conscience and feels betrayed.

The notion that ideas are power permeates the book; the Church and its teaching is, of course, the acknowledged evil tyrant: but one feels that all except the weakest characters here are always trying to dominate someone intellectually, while the author herself is bullying the reader.

Marguerite, the younger sister of Marcelle and Pascal, is the only one of the five girls to break through from ideas to reality. She goes through an intellectual and sentimental education that is familiar from many French novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries and includes immersion (though only ankle-deep) in a luridly stereotyped Parisian underworld; not to speak of an affair with Marcelle's ex-husband, the poète maudit, and advances from his rich lesbian mistress. At the end of it all she finds herself and sums up her story: I wanted 'to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values'. The trouble is that by now Madame de Beauvoir herself has become something of an oracle and her Thirties values seem as ready-made as any other.