The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer by Elizabeth Spencer

First published: 1981

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer is a collection of short stories by one of the most-admired writers in that genre. As a native Mississippian, Elizabeth Spencer is well aware of the restrictions that a traditional society places on all of its members and especially on its women. Many of the characters in her stories are torn between their desire for freedom from family and community pressures and their equally intense need for the sense of stability and permanence that they derive from their heritage.

The collection is introduced by two brief but significant essays. In her preface, the author asserts that even though many of her stories were written while she was living in Italy or in Montreal, she can see that at least in memory the South was always with her. While she was always conscious of place, however, it was not until she had been writing for three decades that a unifying theme appeared in her fiction: the affirmation that girls and women can find ways to make what is for them a very difficult world “possible, livable.”

The foreword by Eudora Welty points to one source of support for such women. As Welty describes their friendship of long standing, which began when Spencer was still in college, it is evident that this relationship, based on respect for each other as individuals and as writers, meant much to both women. Spencer’s fellow Mississippian sees qualities in her friend’s fiction that reflect the tradition of Southern storytellers: the sense of place, the understanding of people, and the delight in absurdity. Spencer’s “detachment” and “scope,” Welty believes, are not so typical of Southern writers.

Since Spencer has arranged these stories in the order in which they were written, it is easy to see how her vision has broadened as she has moved on to new places and new experiences. In the first part of this volume, covering the years from 1944 to 1960, four of the six stories are set in Mississippi. The final story in the first section, however, is set in Italy, as are half of the six stories in the second part, which is dated 1961-1964. By the time that she wrote these stories, Spencer had time to reflect on her life in Italy, where she had gone as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1953, eventually to marry and remain there for several years.

Spencer notes, however, that although she was physically absent from the South, it remained a strong presence in her memory and her imagination. More than half of the thirteen stories in the third and longest segment of the book, consisting of works written between 1965 and 1971, are placed in the South, most of them specifically in Mississippi. Interestingly, though Spencer and her husband had moved to Montreal in 1958, the first of her stories set in Canada does not appear until the final section of this volume, which is dated 1972-1977.

It is not surprising that a writer whose fiction is so much admired for its structure should have displayed her customary precision in the organization of her collection. The work covers thirty-three years, and it contains thirty-three stories—each of which, it should be noted, is unique. When one realizes that in addition to so many stories of uniformly high quality during this period Spencer also published five novels and two novellas, it is evident that she deserves her high standing among contemporary fiction writers.

Context

As Spencer has indicated in various essays and interviews, in her fiction she explores complex situations and relationships, then looks for some way in which her protagonists’ lives can be bettered, if not perfected. As she wrote in the preface to this volume, she seems increasingly to be applying this pattern to what she calls “seeking girls and women.”

From the beginning of her career, Spencer has tended to choose a female point of view for her narratives. In her works of the 1980’s and 1990’s, however, one can see a new emphasis on women’s issues. This is as evident in her novels as in her short stories. In The Night Travellers (1991), although the young draft protester is a sympathetic character and his eventual fate a tragic one, Spencer focuses on the predicament of his young wife—abandoned in a foreign country, left with a child to support but without funds, friends, or family to help her. So often, Spencer sees, it is women who are expected to pick up the pieces.

As a tough-minded realist, however, Spencer does not spend her time bemoaning the problems that women face but instead, especially in the final stories in this collection, tries to see what her characters can do with the hands that they are dealt. Sometimes fortune favors her women. The young girl in “A Christian Education” has a self-sufficient grandfather to imitate; his gift to her is indeed the gift of freedom. Similarly, when her own family scoffs at her ambitions, the protagonist in “Mr. McMillan” finds an academic environment to nurture her. Yet Spencer points out that no matter how hard they try, few women can escape from the past. Thus in “The Search,” although in a symbolic gesture the mother casts off her grief for her missing daughter, her anguish remains with her.

Although some feminist writers see only the positive side of women’s new independence, Spencer admits that the “seeking” women with whom she obviously identifies do pay a price for their unconventionality. There is no question that the narrator of “I, Maureen” had to escape from a stifling family situation; however, her one significant artistic triumph is a photograph of pain. In addition to the fact that she is superb in her craft, Spencer’s sympathy toward her women characters, her sensitivity about their inner conflicts, and most of all, her uncompromising honesty about women’s issues make her works among the most important in contemporary fiction.

Bibliography

Cole, Hunter McKelva. “Windsor in Spencer and Welty: A Real and an Imaginary Landscape.” Notes on Mississippi Writers 7 (Spring, 1974): 2-11. Compares the use made by Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer of the same picturesque ruin. Though the protagonist of Spencer’s story “A Southern Landscape,” Marilee Summerall, knows that both Windsor and the aristocratic Foster Hamilton are doomed, she sees them as symbols of something unchanging.

Evoy, Karen. “Marilee: ‘A Permanent Landscape of the Heart.’” Mississippi Quarterly 36 (Fall, 1983): 569-578. A review of Marilee (1981), which consisted of the three stories told in the voice of Marilee Summerall. Like Spencer herself, Marilee sees how stultifying a traditional society can be, while at the same time finding that only in her recognition of family ties and of the presence of the past can she attain the sense of stability that she desperately needs.

Neely, Jessica. “Personal Allegiances.” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 7 (Winter, 1991-1992): 11-12. Argues that the theme of “personal allegiances—to community, family, friends” dominates Spencer’s later collection, Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988). Stories set in places as different from each other as Canada and the Deep South show how relationships between individuals are affected by group pressures. The reviewer calls Spencer “one of our most accomplished writers.”

Park, Clara Claiborne. “A Personal Road.” Hudson Review 34 (Winter, 1981-1982): 601-605. The South seen through the eyes of Elizabeth Spencer is markedly different from that shown in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty. The “dirty little secret” of Spencer’s world is not its infatuation with history, not even its remnants of racism, but the existence of a rigid class structure which tells individuals who they are and keeps them where they belong. This is the reason that so many of Spencer’s characters leave the South, or at least attempt to do so.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Elizabeth Spencer. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A valuable study, written by an outstanding scholar and checked for accuracy by Spencer herself. Although the bulk of the volume is devoted to the novels, one chapter is devoted to Spencer’s short stories. In another chapter, Prenshaw looks at the novella Knights and Dragons (1965), which she sees as closely related to the short story “Ship Island.” Essential reading.

Spencer, Elizabeth. Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer. Edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. A collection of interviews in which the author speaks candidly about her life and her works. In view of the fact that she had left her native South and was living elsewhere during some extremely productive years, the comments that Spencer makes regarding the relationship between memory, place, and fiction are particularly interesting.

Spencer, Elizabeth. “Storytelling, Old and New.” The Writer 85 (January, 1972): 9-10, 30. Explains how a work of fiction begins with a question, to which the story provides an answer. Spencer voices her disgust with writers’ seeming obsession with sexual fulfillment, suggesting that they devote their energies to exploring how people can learn to live together in harmony.