This very full collection of stories
included the ten stories in a previous volume,
Ship Island and Other Stories (1968).
Of the stories it contains, the ones that have
come in for especial attention are:
“First Dark”
A story set in a small Southern town
featuring a ghost who appears to various
people at different places and times, through
the years. In the story, he has just appeared
to an aristocratic young woman who is taking
care of her invalid mother, and a young man
who lived in the town as a boy and has started
returning to visit. Once aware of their visitations
they begin to go out with one another.
The girl’s mother is domineering and difficult,
an autocrat with a spiteful tongue. The young
man has a poor family background, but is
attractive and intelligent. The ghost remains active.
At least two television scripts have been
written based on this story. It has been translated
into a number of languages and anthologized
many times.
“I, Maureen”
This story is set in Montreal and tells the
story of a rather unremarkable young woman
who nonetheless is appealing to a man of one
of the wealthiest Canadian families. He hastens
her into marriage, and she begins to live a
‘perfect’ life—children, servants, devoted husband,
beautiful houses and possessions. Unable to bear
her unhappiness, she escapes into what is at first
a psychotic, deranged mentality, next a re-location
in the eastern, or lower middle class part of the city.
From here she achieves a return of sanity, manages
some degree of communication with children
and husband left behind, finds a new love
relationship, and puts down the roots of a new life.
The story dramatizes the division between the two
halves of Montreal—each mysterious and little
known to the other. It also portrays the healing
of a woman’s divided psyche.
“A Southern Landscape,” “Sharon”
and “Indian Summer”
These three stories were taken from
The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer and issued
by University Press of Mississippi under the
title Marilee.
The narrator of the three stories is Marilee
Summerall, a very appealing girl growing up
in a fictional town named Port Claiborne, located
in South Mississippi near the River. The first story
deals with an early romance with an upper-class
young man who drinks too much, the second
with her childhood discovery of a sexual relationship
between her beloved Uncle Hernan and his
African-American housekeeper, Melissa. Melissa,
a lovely and well-educated woman, has come
to live in Mississippi from Tennessee with Uncle
Hernan’s bride Eileen. When Eileen died she
stayed on, but the situation which has come
about later has been kept from Marilee until
she makes her own discovery. The third story
involves another uncle, Rex, who leaves his
wife and son during a family quarrel and goes
back to the River to find a primitive life
of trapping and hunting with the family
of a woman he once loved. Marilee’s self-appointed
commitment is to find out where Uncle Rex
is and to aid his reunion with the family. She
is greatly helped by her new 'boy friend,'
a land surveyor, who is a somewhat mysterious
newcomer to the area. All three stories are
included in “The Southern Woman.”
“The Girl Who Loved Horses”
This is a story of a girl brought up riding
and training horses. After her father’s death,
she is attracted to a man who is similarly drawn
to horse training, but after marriage proves rather
reckless and unfaithful. A hired man with an uncanny
resemblance to her husband has been fired
and sent away from their property. He returns
one night when she is alone in the house and tries
to rape her. She is both attracted and repelled
by him and subsequent encounters with him expose
her to extreme danger.
This book was reviewed by Reynolds Price
on page 1 of the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
It was the basis of the Award of Merit Medal
for the Short Story, given by the American Academy.
It was brought out as Penguin paperback, was
issued by Penguin in England and received extensive
praise in a review in TLS. Penguin, New York,
re-issued the collection with a new cover design
and is still in print.
Many of the stories in the volume have
appeared, and continue to appear in anthologies.
Several were included in prize story anthologies
during the years they first came out. Many are now
in print in “The Southern Woman.”
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