SOURCE: Evoy, Karen. “Marilee: ‘A Permanent Landscape of the Heart.’” Mississippi Quarterly 36, no. 4 (fall 1983): 569-78.

In the following essay, Evoy analyzes the narrative voice in the stories comprising Marilee.

Marilee, the recently published volume of three interrelated short stories by Elizabeth Spencer, centers around one of the author's most endearing and most Southern characters. Originally published in The New Yorker and The Southern Review, “A Southern Landscape” (1960), “Sharon” (1970) and “Indian Summer” (1978) were first brought together in The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, an impressive body of short fiction which has garnered both popular and critical success; not only has Penguin Canada sold the paperback rights to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, but the collected stories won the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters' 1983 Award of Merit Medal, with Spencer thus joining the illustrious company of such previous winners as Thomas Mann (1949), Ernest Hemingway...