A stunning collection of stories from “one of the foremost chroniclers of the American South” (The Washington Post), including the novella “Light in the Piazza”—featuring an introduction by Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women Over the course of a fifty-year career, Elizabeth Spencer wrote masterly, lyrical fiction about southerners. An outstanding storyteller who was unjustly denied a Pulitzer for her anti-racist novel
The Voice at the Back Door despite being the unanimous choice of the judges, she is recognized as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction, infusing her work with elegant precision and empathy.
The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s short stories, displaying her range of place—the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after World War II, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt.
The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance
A stunning collection from one of the South's masters of short fiction.
Elizabeth Spencer has been writing masterly short stories and novellas about Southerners for more than fifty years. Her short fiction, infused with the sense of place and the elegant precision of an original voice, has earned her a reputation as one of our most accomplished writers of the form.
The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer's shorter fiction. The book displays Spencer's range of place-the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt. In "The Little Brown Girl," young Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In "First Dark," a young man returns home to tiny Richton, Mississippi, a "land of mourning and shadows and memory." In the elegiac story, "The Cousins," a group of Southerners roams through Italy, tangling with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included here is "The Light in the Piazza," the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that first brought Spencer widespread acclaim, selling more than two million copies worldwide and inspiring the popular award-winning Broadway musical.
In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the long heritage of the Southern short story.
“A national treasure . . . [Elizabeth Spencer] is indispensable witness to the difficulties of having a home and then leaving it, to the struggles of smart, sexually alive young women trying to find their way in the world.”
—The Paris Review “There seems to be nothing this extraordinary writer can’t do.”
—The New York Times
“One of the foremost chroniclers of the American South.”
—The Washington Post“A retrospective collection of twenty-seven stories, written over a period of more than half a century, by a Southern writer whose best fiction merits comparison with the work of Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Spencer is a spellbinding storyteller. Her stories . . . are dense and rich as novels, as light as air; they hover in the mind like hummingbirds.”
—Lee Smith “What [Spencer’s] stories do wonderfully, for me, is explore the ties that bind–in families, friendships, communities, marriages–how mysterious, twisted, chafing, inescapable, and life-supporting such ties are.”
—Alice Munro “A writer one puts on the ‘permanent’ shelf. These stories will be read and reread.”
—James Dickey 
