SOURCE: "The Young Girl in the West: Disenchantment in Jean Stafford's Short Fiction," in Women and Western American Literature, The Whitston Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 230-43.

In this essay, Walsh examines the role of women and girls in the western stories in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, Stafford groups ten stories under the heading, "Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains." The heading, which suggests a romantic, mythic West of the past filled with red men and white men in conflict, ironically comments on the contemporary, restricted lives of the characters in Stafford's stories who grow up overshadowed by that myth. For Stafford's central characters are girls and young women and a small Indian boy. They live in a modern West, most of them in one small town, a vantage point from which they get only occasional glimpses of...