SOURCE: A review of Nine Women, in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1986, p. 92.

The following review provides a brief account of the characters and situations in the stories collected in Nine Women.

[Nine Women] is Shirley Ann Grau's second collection of stories, offering an interesting assortment of characters ranging in age and social position—daughters, mothers, widows, lovers, friends, businesswomen; two of the stories deal with black characters. There is a woman who's the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her family, and spends her life flying from place to place, courting death; an ambitious realtor and her female lover who wants to have a child—theirs; a housekeeper whose employer dies mysteriously. Ms. Grau writes with a graceful simplicity, and she's good at evoking a dreamlike atmosphere. Her conception of dramatic situations is engaging, varied, full of possibilities she doesn't quite realize—perhaps the...