SOURCE: Preface to When Things of the Spirit Come First, translated by Patrick O'Brian, Pantheon Books, 1982, pp. 5-7.

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...