SOURCE: Review of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, by Elizabeth Spencer. Atlantic Monthly 247, no. 3 (March 1981): 90-1.

In the following review, the critic explores stylistic aspects of Spencer's work, including her powers of observation and sensitivity.

The thirty-three stories in this notable collection [The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer], representing an equal number of years of the author's interest in “how you take up residence in the world,” have a curiously literary quality. Assured, sympathetic, thoughtful, and utterly merciless in their revelation of individual foibles, they often seem highly observed, as though the narrator were a particularly intelligent and rather witty fly on the wall. Fortunately, this fly has found any number of different rooms to investigate, discovering in each a distinctive yet oddly familiar ambience.

Spencer is generally considered a southern writer, and roughly half of these tales are set in her native Mississippi, in Arkansas, in Louisiana, where...