SOURCE: "Checkmate: Jean Stafford's 'A Slight Maneuver,'" in Western American Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 2, August, 1986, pp. 99-109.

In this essay, Leary relates the story "A Slight Maneuver" to the break-up of Stafford's marriage to Robert Lowell.

During the waning days of 1946, Jean Stafford's life must have appeared to her to be waning, too. Her six-year marriage to Robert Lowell lay in ruins. Her self-esteem was dangerously diminished, her psyche badly disordered, and her body ravaged by the drink and drugs she had turned to as anodynes for her pain. At this critical moment she sequestered herself in the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York City Hospital where she consented to undergo a "psycho-alcoholic cure."

She could not have made a wiser move. The combined medical and psychiatric help she received there produced in good time a pleasant transformation in both her attitude and her appearance. She learned...