Nancy Hale is most often recognized as a keen observer of people who is at her best when dealing with fundamental human qualities. Hale, who grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, worked in New York City, and lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, from the 1940s until her death in 1988, used her own background for the settings and plots of her stories. Her skill as a writer, though, extends beyond the regionalist's acute and perceptive drawing of the local coloring of Boston's traditionalism, New York's idle rich, and Virginia's idiosyncrasies. With intensity and objectivity, she portrays the deeper reverberations that result when an individual, particularly a woman, moves from one culture to another where she must develop her own identity amid what often becomes a stifling and antagonistic environment.

Nancy Hale was born on 6 May 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of Philip L. and Lilian Westcott Hale. Both her parents...