[In the review below, Davenport discusses the major themes in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, focusing on her portrayal of American women. ]

By all rights, Jean Stafford says in her introduction to these 30 brilliant stories [The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford] selected from her work of the past 25 years, she might have been expected to become a regional writer. She grew up in Colorado, her father wrote cowboy stories, and her cousin Margaret Lynn was the author of A Stepdaughter of the Prairie, a memoir of frontier days in Kansas.

Miss Stafford's career took a different turn. "As soon as I could," she says, "I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean." She has written stories set in France and Germany, Boston and Manhattan and the Caribbean, as well as the West she left behind. Yet Jean Stafford is indeed a regional author, thank goodness, for it is her sense of place that gives such authenticity to her work. To develop her richest strains of meaning she needed the long, silent American summer afternoons which she can render with such magic. And she needed American objects. Like Flaubert and Eudora Welty, Miss Stafford is a master of making the objects in a room exhibit a dumb and eloquent presence. It is this fullness of detail that gives her stories the weight and texture of novels.

There flows through these stories the theme that man is a double prisoner. Over half the stories are set in institutions (universities, a poor-house, a hospital, a courthouse jail, a museum, a church, a zoo); all of them study the inescapable confinement of the self. Some of her richest stories are about the resistance of innocence to the prisons of society and self, but these stories are almost invariably tragic. Those who escape the prison of family and institutions—characters who are usually independent, stubborn, or rambunctious—only enslave themselves the more securely in the prison of self.

Miss Stafford's most obvious symbol of our condition is the blind polar bear in her story "In the Zoo." Like her characters, he is both exile and prisoner, and his blindness is a darker imprisonment still. This same miserable old bear, known to a generation of visitors to the Denver Zoo, can also be seen in Stan Brakhage's strangely beautiful film Anticipation of the Night, where his feral uneasiness is as terrible as the wild instincts Miss Stafford analyzes with such careful understanding in the souls of her characters.

In Miss Stafford's story the bear reminds two middle-aged sisters, seated on a bench outside his cage, of a Mr. Murphy they knew as children. Mr. Murphy, an eccentric who loved animals and children, had given the girls a puppy who when grown became the arm militant of their suspicious, gossipy, boarding-house-keeping guardian. The dog gratuitously killed Mr. Murphy's pet monkey, and Mr. Murphy poisoned the dog. Jean Stafford's point is that the dog was already poisoned by the vile disposition of the boarding-housekeeper. Even in middle age, the two girls cannot quite free themselves of her temperament, either. Mind infects mind. No wonder the symbol of disease is so prevalent in these stories.

When she deals with children and young people Miss Stafford shows ner predilection for the spirit at its most flexible, but also at its most defenseless. In her first novel, Boston Adventure (1944), she depicted the elasticity of a young life in contrast to the constrictions of history and place; and her second book, The Mountain Lion, is one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature.

In some of her stories—"Bad Characters," one of the funniest ever written, and "The Healthiest Girl in Town"—children are allowed to be hilariously, if temporarily, triumphant over the circular sameness of the adult world. The blindness of the young heart is more commonly her theme. In stories like "The Darkening Moon," a tale of awful terror, and "The Bleeding Heart," in which hopelessness heavy as lead is borne like a feather by sheer fantasy of the kind only the young can generate. Miss Stafford develops the fullest potential of her unique talent.

Except for an Indian boy newly orphaned and being taken to a reservation ("A Summer Day"), there are no male characters of the least importance in these stories. There are a few lost men, several mad ones, two savage members of a New York gang, and the momentary presence of Salvador Dali in the Metropolitan Museum ("Children Are Bored on Sunday"). Men are all Salvador Dali to Miss Stafford: busy, important, mysterious to themselves, but as transparent to womankind as a glass of water.

The American woman at all ages is the crucial center. She is the medium through which tradition and manners survive; she must both build and inhabit the prison. Miss Stafford touches deep when she brings together at the end of this book three tragedies in which feminine beauty is the central image—a little girl whose father cuts her hair and treats her like a boy, a wartime gift of a German girl's hair sent home by a soldier, a beautiful woman of "shimmering international fame" whose advancing age shows in her hands.

Within female beauty lies the fact of motherhood. There are no mothers in these stories, only daughters. There are step-parents, and they are always institutions in disguise. Innocence, Miss Stafford seems to say, is the same as freedom and as impossible as freedom. Freedom ought not to be impossible (this anguished perception generates the tension of every story); yet no models exist in our culture for a life that is unconstrained. In the life of women we can see the continuity of a civilization; that is where nature and the fact of the family have placed it.

By choosing to look with such patient scrutiny—the realism of these stories is wonderful beyond praise—at the inner life of woman, Miss Stafford has gone to the very quick of American life. The essence of tragedy is in the kind of solicitude the artist has for the value of life in his time. Miss Stafford's tragic sense is implicit in every line she has written. The goodness of her stories remains in our memory for their patient (and often wildly comic) forgiveness.

It may be that the discontinuity of modern American life explains why such intelligible portions of it can be rendered in a short story. We have no feeling in Miss Stafford's stories that we are being told part of a life; on the contrary, everything about her characters is there, even though her stories may occupy no more than a day or a few hours of time. The moment, not the passage of time, is usually her subject, and place is perhaps more important than time. Fate and character must meet someday at an inevitable crossroads; it is on this encounter that Miss Stafford has her eye.

The beauty of her handling of this moment is in the handling of this moment is in the esthetic distance she keeps between us and the untouchable otherness of her characters. No matter how congenial or how familiar their plight, she does not allow us to violate their essential privacy with sentimentality or an easy understanding. Sentimentality is the casual condescension of indifference. For all her warmth of understanding, Miss Stafford keeps her art high, on a level with justice and impartial truth. It is because of this awesome integrity that even in her slighter stories she can handle brittle and evanescent subjects without having them disintegrate in her hands.

The appearance of these stories in one volume is an event in our literature. To have built up so distinguished a collection, each story excellent in its own way and each an original departure in relation to the others, is a triumph.