SOURCE: A review of The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, in The New York Times Book Review, February 16, 1969, pp. 1, 40.

In the review below, Davenport discusses the major themes in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, focusing on her portrayal of American women.

By all rights, Jean Stafford says in her introduction to these 30 brilliant stories [The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford] selected from her work of the past 25 years, she might have been expected to become a regional writer. She grew up in Colorado, her father wrote cowboy stories, and her cousin Margaret Lynn was the author of A Stepdaughter of the Prairie, a memoir of frontier days in Kansas.

Miss Stafford's career took a different turn. "As soon as I could," she says, "I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean." She has written stories set in France and Germany, Boston and Manhattan...