[In the following preface to When Things of the Spirit Come First, Beauvoir briefly describes her motives for each of the tales in the collection.]

When I started this book, a little before I was thirty, I already had the beginnings and the rough drafts of several novels behind me. In these I had given outward expression to various phantasms; they had almost no relationship to my personal life. Not one of them was finished. After thinking about the matter for a year I made up my mind to write something completely different: this time I should speak about the world I knew, and I should expose some of its defects. A few years before this I had discovered the harm done by the religiosity that was in the air I breathed during my childhood and early youth. Several of my friends had never broken away from it: willingly or unwillingly they had undergone the dangerous influence of that kind of spiritual life. I decided to tell their stories and also to deal with my own conversion to the real world. I linked the characters of these five tales, but the connection was loose and each tale was a self-sufficing entity.

In "Lisa" I described the withering away of a girl whose shy attempts at living were crushed by the mysticism and the intrigues of the pious institution in which we were students together. At a time when her body was insidiously working upon her, she tried to be nothing more than a soul among other souls; and she tried in vain.

I took the idea of "Marcelle" from a young poetess with a large pale forehead whom I had known in Marseilles during the year I was teaching at a lycée there. I had come to realize that when I was a child there was a very close connection between my piety and the masochism of some of my games. I had also learnt that the most devout of my aunts used to make her husband whip her heartily by night. I had fun drawing a picture of piety gradually shading off into shameless appetite. In these two stories I used a tone of false objectivity, a veiled irony after the manner of John Dos Passos.

In "Chantai" I tackled one of my fellow-teachers at Rouen: she taught literature and I saw a good deal of her. She tried to give those who came into contact with her a brilliant image of her life and of herself, and she did so by means of a continual clumsy faking. I invented a private diary in which she pursues 'the wonderful', turning every one of her experiences into something far more glamorous and providing herself with a fictitious character, that of a broad-minded, unprejudiced, intensely sensitive woman. I worked out a plot that made her take off her mask. This tale was an advance on the others: Chantal's inner monologue and her diary showed her both as she longed to be and as she really was. I had succeeded in conveying that distance between a person and himself which is the essence of bad faith.

In my drafts of novels I had already made vain attempts at bringing Zaza back to life—Zaza, the friend who had meant so much to me. In this book I kept closer to reality. "Anne", at the age of twenty, was tormented by the same anguish and the same doubts as Zaza. I drew a more faithful and a more engaging portrait of her than I had done in the earlier versions: yet one does not quite believe in her unhappiness and her death. Perhaps the only way of convincing the reader was to give an exact account of both, as I did in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

The book ends with a satire on my youth. I give "Marguerite" my own childhood at the Cours Désir and my own adolescent religious crisis. After this she falls into the pitfall of 'the wonderful', as I did when I was influenced by my cousin Jacques (though Jacques had scarcely any resemblance to the character Denis). In the end her eyes are opened; she tosses mysteries, mirages and myths overboard and looks the world in the face. I think this is the best part of the book. I wrote it in a lively style and with a fellow-feeling for the heroine.

The book is a beginner's piece of work. But looking back at it from a distance of forty years, I felt that in spite of its obvious faults it had merit enough for me to wish to see it published. There are readers who have liked it. I hope that in England and the United States there may be some others who also find it moving.