[The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon] may be divided into the central and peripheral. The peripheral are relatively few, with two long examples, "The Captive" (the story of a white woman captured by Indians) and "Emmanuele! Emmanuele!" (laid in North Africa and France), and some several short pieces involving the Civil War. The central stories, more numerous, refer to the land [of southeast Kentucky] …, and in these the enclosing sense of the land combines with the enclosing sense of family and kin. It is true that, at all levels of society in the South, the sense of kinship, of the clan, of the family, hung on long after it died elsewhere, and hung on with so strong a sense of obligation that to the outsider it seems—or not too long ago seemed—nonsense or mystique. Caroline Gordon's stories are set just before the breakdown of the sense...