The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
by Jean Stafford
Summary
Thirty stories, written between 1944 and 1968, arranged by where they take place: Americans loose in Europe, Boston and New England, the Colorado of her childhood, and Manhattan.
Stafford's subject is a particular kind of trapped person, usually female, usually clever, usually being handled by someone who considers themselves kind. In the Zoo, the best known, gives two middle aged sisters remembering the Colorado guardian who raised them and the dog she turned into a weapon. The Interior Castle puts a young woman on an operating table having her shattered face rebuilt, and stays inside her skull throughout. A Country Love Story leaves a wife alone in a Maine farmhouse with a convalescent husband who has decided she is unfaithful, and lets her invent someone to be unfaithful with.
The Manhattan stories are the coldest of the four groups. Children Are Bored on Sunday walks a woman who has been avoiding everyone she knows through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, straight into one of them.
She is very funny, in a way that is easy to miss because the comedy sits in the diction. A Stafford sentence will describe a monstrous relative with such courtesy that the cruelty arrives a beat late.
Eighteen of these first appeared in The New Yorker and they carry that magazine's finish: no wasted movement, an ending that stops rather than resolves, every detail doing more than one job.
Around five hundred pages, and better in ones and twos than straight through, because the effects repeat when they are crowded.
Best for readers who want the postwar American short story from a writer who was in every anthology in 1955 and had dropped out of most of them by 1985.
Historical Context & Significance
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, gathering work from Children Are Bored on Sunday and Bad Characters along with stories from magazines. She had already taken seven O. Henry Awards.
The facial injury behind The Interior Castle was real. In 1938 Stafford was a passenger in a car that Robert Lowell drove into a wall, and her skull and nose were broken and rebuilt over several operations. She sued him for the medical costs and married him two years later, the first of three marriages, the last and happiest to the New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, who died in 1963.
She published almost no fiction after this book. Alcoholism, a stroke in 1976 and emphysema ended it, and she died in 1979.
Her reputation has recovered slowly and largely through other writers arguing for her. The Library of America has since issued her complete short stories, which is the edition to look for now.