SOURCE: Park, Clara Claiborne. “A Personal Road.” Hudson Review 34, no. 4 (winter 1981): 601-05.

In the following essay, Park discusses the American South as a major theme in Spencer's fiction.

“The good South, bestowing blessings at the cradle of storytellers, endowed her most tenderly with a sense of place.” It is next to impossible to write about the fiction of Southern writers without the phrase “a sense of place”—if Eudora Welty hadn't used it in her foreword to these collected stories of Elizabeth Spencer's,¹ I would have had to. “The best of American fiction has always been regional,” wrote Flannery O'Connor in an essay on this very subject. “The ascendancy passed from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal...