[One] realizes how little one knows about Beauvoir from any source other than herself. Few authors can in their lifetime have so firmly controlled the material on which the secondary industry is based.
A further example of this is the publication [in 1979] … of Quand prime le spirituel, which Gallimard and Grasset turned down in the 1930s, and which Beauvoir decided was worth rescuing from a dusty drawer…. [This] loosely-linked collection of five novellas shows almost all the five heroines living through some conflict between their Catholic upbringing and their adolescent or repressed sexuality in the unsettling Paris of the twenties and thirties. The verdict of Grasset's reader—'ce roman manque d'originalité profonde'—may be considered not entirely fair by some readers; in some ways these rather relentlessly written nouvelles were groping after a more raw or self-revealing account of woman's experience than, say, a novel by Colette. But while there is some intensity, there is in the end little power.
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