[In the following excerpt, Bailey explores the theme of missed opportunities in Spencer's stories.]

Whilst reading Bobbie Ann Mason, I was sometimes reminded of another Southern celebrator of small-town life—the wonderful Eudora Welty, who also finds nothing too trivial for her consideration. Welty provides a typically generous Foreword to the serenely assured stories of her friend Elizabeth Spencer, which are now available in paperback. A lifetime's work is contained in this fat volume, from ‘The Little Brown Girl’ of 1944 to ‘The Girl Who Loved Horses’ of 1977. What is astonishing about the collection is its certainty of tone—a tone that is maintained for over 400 pages. Elizabeth Spencer had a confident voice from the very start of her distinguished career, and it has never deserted her. Yet for all her narrative confidence, it is her gift for insinuation that most impresses: the odd, perfectly placed sentence that signifies that a second story is lurking behind the one that is presently being told.

Implicit in almost every Spencer story is the idea of possibilities and alternatives, of paths not taken. A cautious optimism informs her subtle art. ‘A great hidden world shimmered for a moment, grew almost visible, just beyond the breaking point of knowledge,’ she has her narrator observe at the close of ‘The Day Before,’ a delicate evocation of a momentous day in a child's life in a Mississippi town in the 1920s. ‘Life is important right down to the last crevice and corner,’ that same narrator decides, 40 years later. In The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer those crevices and corners can be found in the American South, where she was born and raised; in Italy, a country she delights in; and in Montreal, the city in which she has lived and worked for several decides.