SOURCE: "More on the Second Sex," in New Republic, Vol. 160, No. 10, March 8, 1969, pp. 27-8.

In the following review, Littlejohn notes both the merits and flaws of the novellas in Beauvoir 's The Woman Destroyed.

Two of the three narrative portraits that make up Simone de Beauvoir's latest book are unpleasant and unpersuasive; the third is a quite beautiful success. All three are variations on a theme of the woman of middle or later age (43, 44, 60) who suddenly finds herself thrown on her own resources (a lifetime's delusions, the defensive fictions of pride), resources that turn out to be wretchedly inadequate for the job of supporting her through the desert ahead. All these women—the intellectual, the bourgeoise, the shrew—prove in the end desperately dependent on their men; their stories could serve as a kind of illustrative appendix to The Second Sex.

But the fictional case study—the confined...