SOURCE: "The Lion in Winter: Jean Stafford's Heart of Darkness," in Village Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1992, pp. 31-2.

In the following essay, D'Erasmo gives an overview of Stafford's career, providing insights into why she stopped writing .

In one of Jean Stafford's most famous stories, "The Interior Castle," a young woman named Pansy Vannemann lies immobilized in a hospital bed after a disfiguring car accident. Retreating from her terrible pain, she imagines her own brain in voluptuous detail: "She envisaged [it], romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely. It was always pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable." Stafford's model was St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, an account of the soul's progress through pain to enlightenment. Pansy, however, is no saint...