The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

Summary

Gathering thirty stories written across her career, the volume ranges from New England drawing rooms to Western boarding houses and European resorts, often centering on solitary girls and women uneasy in their surroundings. Stafford writes in elegant, slightly acerbic sentences, attentive to social nuance and the small humiliations that shape interior life. Readers regard the collection as a high point of midcentury American short fiction.