Certainly the stories [of Jean Stafford] are exquisitely wrought, sensitively imagined like glass flowers, or arabesques, or the 'interior castle' of Pansy Vanneman's brain ("Not only the brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ itself which she envisioned, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely")…. Dramatic tension is subdued, in a sense forced underground, so that while narrative conflict between individuals is rare, an extraordinary pressure is built up within the protagonists, who appear trapped inside their own heads, inside their lives (or the social roles their 'lives' have become), and despair of striking free. Intelligence and self-consciousness and even a measure of audacity are not quite enough to assure freedom, as the heroines of the late stories "Beatrice Trueblood's Story" and "The End of a Career" discover painfully…. The finest of Jean Stafford's stories possess an eerily elegiac tone, though they are never morbid or self-pitying. "In the Zoo" tells a frightful tale, the narrator confesses that "my pain becomes intolerable," but the story concludes with an extravagant outburst of paranoia that manages to be comic as well as distressing…. (p. 61)

This is an art that curves inward toward the meditative, the reminiscent, given life not by bold gestures or strokes but by a patient accumulation of sharply-observed impressions: the wealth of a poet's eye, or a painter's. "The Lippia Lawn", for instance, is an exercise in recollection, so graphically presented as to allow the reader to share in the young woman's grasping, groping effort to isolate an image out of her past. (pp. 61-2)

One cannot quarrel with the prevailing critical assessment that finds Jean Stafford's art "poised," "highly reflective," "fastidious," "feminine." And certainly she worked within the dominant fictional mode or consciousness of her time—there are no experimental tales in the Collected Stories (which cover the years 1944–1969); no explorations beyond the Jamesian-Chekhovian-Joycean model in which most "literary" writers wrote during those years. (Joycean, that is, in terms of Dubliners alone.) Each story remains within the consciousness of an intelligent and highly sensitive observer who assembles details from the present and summons forth details from the past, usually with a graceful, urbane irony; each story moves toward an 'epiphany,' usually in the very last sentence. There is very little that remains mysterious in Stafford's stories, little that is perplexing or disturbing in terms of technique, structure, or style. Some of the stories, it must be admitted, are marred by an arch, over-written self-consciousness, too elaborate, too artificial, to have arisen naturally from the fable at hand (as in "I Love Someone," "Children Are Bored on Sunday," "The Captain's Gift"). Characters tend to resemble one another in speech and manners, and there is little distinction between men and women; occasionally the author offers clichés in place of careful observation…. (pp. 62-3)

When one considers the finest of the stories, however, one is impressed by the rigorous structure that underlies the "beautiful" prose. And there are of course sudden jarring images, sudden reversals, that brilliantly challenge the sensibility evoked by the fiction's near-constant authorial voice—which is, for the most part, reflective, obsessively analytical, compulsively self-conscious. (p. 63)

Subdued and analytical and beautifully-constructed stories, then, in what might be called a "conventional" fictional mode: but they are not to be too quickly grasped, too glibly assessed. The "interior castle" of Stafford's art is one which will repay close scrutiny for its meanings open slowly outward, and each phrase, each word, is deliberately chosen. (p. 64)