SOURCE: "The Short Story Cycles: When Things of the Spirit Come First and The Woman Destroyed," in The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir, Routledge, 1988, pp. 143-74.

In the essay below, Fallaize compares Beauvoir's two short fiction collections to demonstrate her narrative development.

To read Simone de Beauvoir's two short story cycles together is to span the whole breadth of her published fiction, since When Things of the Spirit Come First was written in 1935-37, before any of her published novels, and The Woman Destroyed came last, written in 1967-68 after all the novels. Opening and closing Beauvoir's fictional production in this way, and separated by more than 30 years, the broadly similar form of the two works offers a unique opportunity to consider developments in Beauvoir's use of narrative strategies.

When Beauvoir wrote The Woman Destroyed, her first collection of short stories lay in the back of a drawer...