Beginning her long writing career toward the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne's and producing her last book in the same year that saw the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first, Harriet Prescott Spofford was inevitably buffeted by the winds of literary change. Initially admired for her romantic color, she was soon condemned for such "fatal fluency" and finally praised for her stark portraits of New England natives in The Elder's People (1920). Yet Spofford's style did not evolve as much as the attitudes of her critics and publishers; both realistic stories and romantic tales can already be found in her first collection, The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863). Seldom do her stories lack the texture of careful research and observed reality whether she is imagining the streets and cataloguing the wines of a Paris she had never seen or recalling the villages and people of her native New England. The...