The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction

Born in rural Carrollton, Mississippi, Elizabeth Spencer, in the great tradition of Falkner, Welty, and O’Connor, has been writing masterly stories and novellas about Southerners for more than forty years. Her short fiction, infused with the green of place and the elegant precision of an original voice, has earned her a reputation as on of our most accomplished writers of the form. Madison Smartt Bell writes, “Few contemporary short-story writers have mastered or understood the art, and one can be grateful to her for keeping it so marvelously alive.”

The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s shorter fiction, including six new stories written in recent years. The book displays Spencer’s range of place—the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt. In “The Little Brown Girl,” young Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In “First Dark,” a young man returns home to tiny Richton, Mississippi, a “land of mourning and shadows and memory.” In the long elegiac story “The Cousins,” a group of Southerners roams through Italy, brushing with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included here is “The Light in the Piazza,” the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that first brought Spencer widespread acclaim, selling more than two million copies worldwide and never falling out of print.

In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the long heritage of the Southern short story. As George Garret has written, “In this age of the short story, nobody is writing stories of the depth and delicacy, the strength and subtlety, found in the stories of Elizabeth Spencer.”