Qualities that we associate with the southern mind dominate Miss Gordon as they do writers as various as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren. Like these distinguished contemporaries of hers, she has made creative use of the tragic dimensions of human life, the aborted aspirations of most human beings, the sense of evil infecting the good and true, the glories and the burdens of a legendary past, the sense of cultures and individuals in conflict, and a feeling for place that becomes a muted passion.

It is the strength of Miss Gordon's work to suggest continually new facets of significance as one lives through the books in his mind. The characters and the incidents form new configurations with the result that the significance of any one of her books enlarges constantly as one reviews it. Her purpose has been from the beginning to suggest that reality...