SOURCE: Maillard, Keith. Review of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, by Elizabeth Spencer. Quill and Quire 47, no. 3 (March 1981): 59.

In the following review of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Maillard discusses the notion of “secondary realities” in Spencer's stories and maintains that they show the mystery that exists beneath the surface of human existence.

Elizabeth Spencer grew up in Mississippi, lived in Italy and settled in Montreal. Her collected stories, written between 1944 and 1979, spread across time and geography, moving, by the centre of the book, to a sophisticated urban present, but returning, by the end, to where they began: the rural South of her youth. As one would expect of work sold to such magazines as The New Yorker, Atlantic, Chatelaine and Redbook, her stories are stylistically conservative and highly professional, but many are more than merely excellent mainstream fiction. At her best, Spencer draws back a veil from...