SOURCE: Wimsatt, Margaret. Review of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, by Elizabeth Spencer. America 145, no. 1 (4 July 1981): 19-20.

In the following review, Wimsatt praises Spencer's powers of description and places her in the company of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, claiming that her stories convey a sense of lurking evil.

One lasting ingredient of “Southern charm” is Southern conversation, read or spoken and heard. The conversation depends on learning: Certain bits of Cato and Seneca absorbed, Virgil too and Horace, by the grandfathers, passed on a bit diluted to the sons, picked up and remixed by the womenfolk. The ear is all-important, ear and the ability to spin a story, manage a plot. One thinks of Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and, from now on, one will have to think of Elizabeth Spencer. Here she reprints 33 stories, more than one-third from the pages of The New Yorker. In...