Assia Djebar wrote four novels during the first phase of her career between 1957 and 1967. After leaving the Ecole normale supérieure at Sèvres during the war of independence, she worked for the national newspaper El moudjahid conducting interviews with Algerian refugees in Tunis and Morocco, before going on to teach history in Rabat and later in Algiers. The novels consist at this stage in a form of experimentation, and the period can be seen as one of apprenticeship in the strategies and techniques of writing. At times highly naive and a little self-indulgent, Djebar's early novels set out to identify her specific concerns as a writer and to develop a sense of the position of women in Algerian society. Occasionally simplistic and often tentative, these works nevertheless testify to a gradual dawn of consciousness, and Djebar creates through the writing of these early texts the seeds of the philosophical and political meditations on specificity and its limits that will characterise her later work. Most importantly, it is possible to chart through the works an awareness of some of the tensions and contradictions that will be developed in her later writing. The women's romantic tribulations recounted in La Soif become, by the time of Les Alouettes naïves, a far more sophisticated set of reflections on memory, on the relationship between self and other, and on the confused intermingling of the war effort with changes in sexual and gender norms.