[In the following excerpt, Collins surveys Spencer's short fiction.]

You have to be a bit of a sensationalist to like short stories, a junkie for literary thrills and chills. Short stories are where writers become immoderate, where they shed the clothes of their full-length intentions and parade stark naked as storytellers, crisis-mongers, whim-pedlars, poets. Reviewers lament the reputed death of the short story—readers, they say, don't read them, magazines have abandoned them. What this means is that they're not so profitable anymore, not that writers have stopped writing them—or publishing them. Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Ann Beattie, Ian MacEwan—how could any of them give up the occasional freedom of not having to tell you all the story? Let's start a trend, a stay of execution for the short story. Reading them can be a private vice, as addictive as eating potato chips.

Take the case of Elizabeth Spencer. She is a novelist (Fire in the Morning, The Light in the Piazza) whose reputation may well be brought out of eclipse by the publication of her collected short stories. Born in Carrollton, Miss., and now living in Montreal, Spencer has never managed to get her head up high enough to be seen over the shoulders of other southern writers of her generation—Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty. This is not her fault, just circumstance, for as Welty writes in her introduction to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, “[Spencer's] fiction has consistently reached toward its own range, found its own scope, its own depth.”

Thus you will find the by now familiar landscape of the southern writer, but you will also find plausible mermaids, ghosts and rain so hot that drops falling on the shoulders of a young girl leave burns (remember, short story writing is the art of the excessive). Straying from climbing vines and columns of the South to Italy and Canada, Spencer also charts the lives of women who lose their souls (or almost do) through invasions by men and family. Martha Ingram, in the novella Knights and Dragons, uses the body of one strong man to murder the memory of another but ends up empty of her own self: “She was of those whom life had held a captive and in freeing herself she had met dissolution, and was a friend now to any landscape. …” Maureen of “I, Maureen” is literally struck by a shaft of light that sends her screaming out of marriage to the son of the rich Partham family and back to what she might have been—a short, dumpy, poor Montrealer who wields the immense power of honesty.

In Spencer's stories change hurts—sometimes to death—and lives are transformed by gesture. Illusions, once shattered, refuse to be put back together again; clinging to the past makes it impossible to skate on the surface of the present. The happy (if eccentric) family of “Prelude to a Parking Lot” can't rebuild itself having caught a glimpse in the held mirror of a young boarder's eyes: “‘I don't like any of you. … It smells funny here. I have to leave.’” Maybe they do smell, they think, and nothing is ever the same. But some families are proof against such wounds and set up for their members charmed lives built out of grace and love; this is what (if you had to choose) Spencer does best. The Summeralls and Wirths, the Bufords and Andersons carry themselves through harsh change, their feet find the “sure terrain” of a “permanent landscape of the heart.”