Preview of Complete Collected Stories of V. S. Pritchett Summary:

Love and sex stand as major Pritchett themes, principally because they encourage him to focus upon human involvements that by their very nature arise from and relate to social and psychological conflicts. In "The Diver" (from The Camberwell Beauty and Other Stories, 1974, and first published as in the New Yorker as "The Fall" ), a young Englishman undergoes an initiation into love. Mocked by a middle-aged French woman lying naked on her bed, he lies in response to her question, "You have never seen a woman before?" A sexual block has hindered his powers as a man and as a writer. However, as he stands there, naked and frightened, his brain begins to fashion a story; he becomes a writer again. As Eudora Welty pointed out, "The Diver" allows us to understand that "in times of necessity or crisis, a conspiracy may form among the deep desires of our...