The Southern Woman: Selected Fiction

Born in rural Carrollton, Mississippi, Elizabeth Spencer has been writing masterly stories and novellas about Southerners for more than half a century. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s shorter fiction and displays her range of place–the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and the contemporary Sun Belt. In “The Little Brown Girl,” Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In the elegiac “The Cousins,” a group of Southerners roams through Italy, brushing with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included is “The Light in the Piazza,” the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that brought Spencer widespread acclaim and was adapted for both the screen and the Broadway stage. In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the distinguished heritage of the Southern short story.