The history of the prepublication revision that shaped The Beggar Maid supports the many critics who suggest readers approach the book as a story cycle, that is, as ten independent interdependent stories which invite the reader to construct and reconstruct interconnected patterns of recurring characters, images, motifs, and themes.

(Further support for this claim comes from the fact that eight of the stories were published separately in a variety of magazines prior to being collected and arranged in the cycle.) In brief, the first version of the book contained a group of third-person stories about Rose and a group of stories narrated in the first person by a character named Janet. Three of the original "Janet stories" ("Connection," "The Stone in the Field," and "The Moons of Jupiter") were dropped from the second version and later included in the collection The Moons of Jupiter (1982); the remaining first-person "Janet...