SOURCE: Roberts, Terry. “Italy: Dream and Nightmare.” In Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer, pp. 50-62. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Roberts delineates the differences between Spencer's Italian novellas.

Nobody with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried the dream is thought to be, in Italy it will rise and walk again.

—The Light in the Piazza

Although its popularity has not lasted, The Light in the Piazza was even more immediately successful than The Voice at the Back Door. Peggy Prenshaw has described in some detail how, in addition to a McGraw-Hill Fiction Award, The Light in the Piazza received rave reviews. For example, Orville Prescott (New York Times) thought it “one of the four or five best novels of 1960”; Susan M. Black (New Republic) found it “the best new novel … this year”; and...