The ten stories collected [in Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories] reveal a many-faceted if unextended talent concentrated mainly on the portrayal of woman acutely vulnerable to the burden of love enhanced by rejection.

Of such is the longest and ripest story, "A Place in the Country," in which the heroine loves her cousin's husband with a blind, despairing passion, deepest at the instant of parting. Neither in this story nor in any other in this volume does the author use a march of scenes to portray a conscious tension between two parts of her heroine's psyche. The structure of the stories, like the imagery, is suggestive rather than rounded. Shirley Hazzard has much of the delicacy and subtlety and poignancy that distinguished Katherine Mansfield and Willa Cather, but without the fulness of dilemma one finds in "Bliss" or "A Wagner Matinée."…

In bringing some characters into...