Beginnings and Quand prime le spirituel

Abstract

One strand of the first two volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs is the record of the early development of her interest in literature, her decision to become a writer, and the numerous false starts that she made before, at the age of twenty-nine, actually submitting a work of fiction to a publisher. The collection of stories Quand prime le spirituel (When Things of the Spirit Come First) was rejected in 1937–8 by both Gallimard and Grasset, but brought out by the former in 1979, by which time not only had Beauvoir achieved a world-wide reputation as a writer, she had also published, some eleven years earlier, what turned out to be her last fictional work.