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

In the following essay, Keefe details how Beauvoir played with the theme of self-deception in each of the novellas in The Woman Destroyed.

In the following essay, McNeece identifies the role language plays in the sufferings of Beauvoir's women protagonists in the collection The Woman Destroyed.

In the following essay, Ward examines Beauvoir's views concerning the nature of the female body and gender roles. Rejecting the view that Beauvoir's feminism is guided by principles of biological determinism, Ward contends that Beauvoir "should be seen as developing a social-constructivist view of the body."

In the following essay, Kruks offers a reexamination of Beauvoir's view of female subjectivity and her relationship to contemporary postmodern and feminist thought.

In the following essay, Keefe examines Beauvoir's interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in The Mandarins, Les Belles Images, and The Woman Destroyed. According to Keefe, "Beauvoir's broad view of the development of the individual and of family life has very obviously been much influenced by psychoanalytic theory and modern psychiatry in general."

In the following essay, Yanay examines Beauvoir's interpretation of female dependency, interpersonal connection, and autonomy as suggested in her autobiographic writings. According to Yanay, Beauvoir invites an alternate notion of female independence based on "themes of spontaneity and authenticity of expression."

In the following essay, Keefe discusses Beauvoir's political perspective during the Cold War and attitudes concerning the United States and the U.S.S.R. as reflected in Le sange des autres, Les mandarins, Les belles images, Le femme rompue and "Malentendu à Moscou."

[Here is] what strikes me in Simone de Beauvoir, what makes her worth reading and thinking about time after time. Her conflicts are central—for women, for men, for our age—personally as well as politically. Throughout her books there is a tension between being alone, solitary, an individual, and being a part of a friendship, a love, a political group, the world. The issue here is one's ultimate aloneness, but also one's inability as a human being to do anything that is not a soci...

In the following excerpt, Keefe studies characterization in Beauvoir's stories.

Les Belles Images, "The Pretty Pictures": the title is ironic. It tells us that Simone de Beauvoir intends her novel to be a criticism of idealism. Less obviously, it refers to a Sartrian conception of the image which we need to understand if we are to grasp the full significance of the novel. The "pretty pictures" from which it takes its title refer not to the mental images of classical psychology but to an "attitude of absence" or a flight from everyday existence....

[The Ceremony of Farewells] is an account of the decade preceding Sartre's death. The title is itself a recollection of a poignant moment, as Beauvoir explains: "'Then this is the ceremony of farewells!' Sartre said to me as we were leaving each other for a month at the beginning of one summer. I had a presentiment of the meaning these words would one day assume. The ceremony lasted ten years. It is these ten years that I recount in this book." The record is annalistic, th...

In the following review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, Bair briefly outlines the merits, flaws, and overall significance of Beauvoir's stories.

Here, Westbrook examines Beauvoir's novellas as existential works.

Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death does not qualify as the "ultimate revelation" [that is, a completely honest presentation of another's dying and one's own response to that experience, but it comes close] … to a confrontation with the inappropriate death of a loved one, in this instance her mother. But even in this narrative, disclosure is balanced by unconscious suppression, as we witness how a sensitive literary intelligence (when writing from her own point o...

In the following review of Beauvoir's collection The Woman Destroyed, Tindall argues that the women protagonists featured in the three novellas suffer from a "human condition" rather than "exclusively feminine misfortunes. "

Below, Ascher comments on the existentialist elements connecting Beauvoir's stories.

In the following review of When Things of the Spirit Come First, Annan discusses how the stories reflect Beauvoir's values.

A beacon, a symbol, the author of feminism's most important theoretical text, a great lover, a militant at 76—Simone de Beauvoir seems beyond criticism, creator of one of the most examined lives ever lived. She has had what she wanted, Sartre and writing, writing and Sartre; "I have never met anyone," she says in her memoirs, "in the whole course of my life, who was so well equipped for happiness as I was, or who labored so stubbornly to achieve it." Why then have I...

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

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.

In the following assessment of the collection The Woman Destroyed, Culligan briefly comments on the theme of suffering in the novellas.

Below, Connell finds the novellas of The Woman Destroyed highly credible, purporting that they should not be read as fiction but rather as "extensions of the author."

In her laudatory estimation of Beauvoir's stories, Duchêne observes Beauvoir's attack of bourgeois society in the collection.

In the following assessment of When Things of the Spirit Come First, the critic finds Beauvoir's stories immature but significant for the light they shed on "both the difficulties of the young writer and her eventual achievement"

The five stories in ["When Things of The Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales"] were written after Miss de Beauvoir had abandoned several complete and partly complete early writings that were never offered for publication because of what she called "shoddy romanticism."… She had already decided that fiction should be her means of expression and to this end began experimenting with short texts that fictionalized her own experiences as well as those of other women. In the fiv...

Entertained, appalled (once or twice), irritated (occasionally), enthralled (often), amused (in places where this was not the author's intention), moved and, above all, compelled to stay with her to the last page, I stand back from [Force of Circumstance] and, for me, this life gives purchase most clearly in three aspects and in this order: the experience of being French during the Algerian war; the position of the Leftist outside the Communist Party; woman as intellectual. Here is Simone de Beauvoir...

The information on the cover [of Quand prime le spirituel], which indicates that this is the author's first book and that it is a novel, is somewhat misleading on two counts…. The volume is … neither her first novel nor a novel but rather long stories concerning different characters, among whom there are ties of family or friendship and who thus move in the same milieu…. The texts are not arranged in order of composition but rather according to the chronology of the characters&#x...

[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 liv...

Scandalized by the neglect into which [the Marquis de Sade] has fallen, yet repudiating the obvious topsy-turvy whereby he has been deified, [Mme de Beauvoir asks in her The Marquis de Sade] that he be regarded as a man and a writer. Yet it is not as author nor as sexual pervert that he interests her, but by his efforts to justify his perversions, to 'erect his tastes into principles'. 'He dreamed of an ideal society from which his special tastes would not exclude him.'… M...

[When de Beauvoir wrote the stories now published as When Things of The Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales, she] had already removed herself morally and politically from the world she was describing—which may account for her harshness toward the heroines in some of these stories. Already, while teaching in the provinces, she and Sartre had been involved in a long and difficult triangle with one of de Beauvoir's students (the basis of L'invitée, her first published novel, transla...

[Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre] is a deliberate affront to conventional notions of privacy and dignity. It's an exact, stoical account of Sartre's disintegration during his last 10 years, and in writing it Simone de Beauvoir is testifying, with a kind of obstinate scrupulosity, to their shared freedom from all such conventional decencies as would—for example—keep a great man's image 'intact.' 'Honesty suited us,' she said in a 1973 interview ...

In this short, painful and honest book [A Very Easy Death], Simone de Beauvoir describes the death of her mother from cancer, in some clinical detail, and the changing emotions the daughters felt. She also attempts, as a rationalist—who saw with surprise her conventionally pious mother indifferent to the consolations of religion—to think again about a subject that none of us now cares to think about…. It was what is called 'an easy death'; but the death in her mother...

The ruthlessness with which Simone de Beauvoir documents Sartre's deterioration is, at first, appalling. The puddle of piss he leaves on a chair is recorded. So is the dribble on his shirt. Nothing is shameful to de Beauvoir if it is true: the ugliest, the least dignified truth is beauty. The staccato rat-a-tat of the years of Sartre's faltering final decade, 1970–1980, shatters our and the 19th-century's obsession with immutable Grecian urns, with adolescent 'perfection&#...