SOURCE: Buffington, Robert. “Ways Religious, Tedious, Fabulous, and Labyrinthine.” Sewanee Review 90, no. 2 (spring 1982): 264-73.

In the following excerpt, Buffington describes the stories in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer as unsettling.

The distinguished authors of these four cumulative collections [The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty] were born between 1895 (Caroline Gordon) and 1921 (Elizabeth Spencer). Three are southerners. All are women. Artists all, they resist much further generalization. No blanket will stay tucked around them.

Caroline Gordon, who died last year in Mexico, is probably more familiar to present-day readers for her tutelage of Flannery O'Connor than for her own work. O'Connor was only one of the younger writers in the debt of this brilliant and dedicated student of the art of fiction. At the same time that she was advising O'Connor on...