SOURCE: Enright, D. J. “The Landscape of the Heart.” Times Literary Supplement (15 July 1983): 745.

In the following review, Enright offers a varied critique of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer.

Elizabeth Spencer was born in Mississippi (“‘the South’, our much perused literary land”, as Eudora Welty puts it in her amiable but brief foreword), was “indefinitely detained” in Italy, and now lives in Montreal. These are the terrains of her stories, not invented, but found or given.

The new reader of this generous selection of stories [The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer] drawn from the period 1944 to 1977—mind still virgin, apart perhaps from some vague confusion of Elizabeths: Bowen, Taylor, Bishop, Hardwick, Jennings, Jenkins—will be struck by those coolly brilliant phrases, images or aperçus which at once mark out the artist from the journeyman of letters: the more brilliant for their seeming casualness, they appear, you do not hear...