SOURCE: Haynes, Michael A. Review of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, by Elizabeth Spencer. Library Journal 106 (1 March 1981): 578.

In the following review, Haynes notes that Spencer's stories have a strong sense of place and realistic characters.

The 33 stories collected here [in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer], representing nearly four decades of writing, are varied in tone, theme, and setting, but the best are those set in the South. Like Faulkner, a fellow Southerner, Spencer has a strong sense of place and a feeling that the past lives on in the present. And her characters—like a little boy who becomes an “instrument of destruction,” a man who can find lost things, and a scholar seeking an “audience” with the top man in his field—are thoroughly engaging and real. Full of images that, in the author's words, “never go away; they do not even fade,” this collection of stories...