SOURCE: "Orphans in Solitary Confinement: The Short Stories," in Innocence and Estrangement in the Fiction of Jean Stafford, Louisiana State University Press, 1987, pp. 129-42.

[In the following essay, Ryan discusses Stafford's depiction of women and children in her short fiction. ]

As her novels and stories indicate, in technique as well as theme, Jean Stafford is interested in discovery, in the revelatory moment, in the burgeoning of awareness. Appropriately, of all her characters, her children most vividly and cogently present her world view. Handicapped by their youthful inefficacy and their limited knowledge and understanding, these young people are frequently put further at a disadvantage by less common circumstances: some are orphaned and unwanted; some (like Molly Fawcett) are precocious and misunderstood; and nearly all bear the double burden of being both young and female. As the titles of some of her stories about adult female protagonists indicate ("Children Are Bored on Sunday," "The Children's Game"), Stafford metaphorically associates women and children, who, as minority members of a maledominated society, often share the bleak recognition that life is inequitable.

Yet, despite the intrinsic affinity between women and children in Stafford's world, ironically, her female protagonists rarely have children of their own. Angelica Early, Mary Heath, Cora Maybank, Mary Rand, Beatrice Trueblood, and May in "A Country Love Story" are all married and of childbearing age, but childless, and seem neither to consider having children nor to regret not having them. Perhaps it is because she herself (by necessity) had no children that Stafford did not attempt to recreate the experience of motherhood in her fiction. More likely, however, these characters' memories of the trials of childhood, as well as their adult perceptions of life, have made them reluctant to introduce children into this "improbable world." Certainly childhood memories are significant in many of Stafford's stories of adults.

The sudden snowfall in "The Philosophy Lesson" occasions Cora's memories of fetching Christmas greens with her brother and father, and sledding on a dangerous but thrilling hill. Her recollections in "An Influx of Poets" are less pleasant but more instructive: "Each Fourth of July night at Grann Savage's house in Missouri, before we moved to Colorado, my father had caught fireflies in one of Mama's hairnets and draped it over my older sister Abigail's head." As her younger sister watched, Abigail would dance and twirl. "I wanted a halo, too, but there was no other hairnet, and when I stamped my foot and shouted, 'It isn't fair!' Mama tried to soothe me, saying, 'Never mind. You can put it on when Abigail is through.'" Polly Bay remembers the Fourth of July and Christmas too, as well as Thanksgiving and Sunday dinners at Greatgrandmother's house, where "the Presbyterian grace was half as long as a sermon" and as dry as the fried rabbit, and "on reflection, she understood the claustrophobia that had sent her sisters and cousins all but screaming out of town; horrified, she felt that her own life had been like a dream of smothering." Beatrice Trueblood's hideous childhood is so memorable, and the memory of it so powerful, that, years later, it accounts in part for her deafness; and Pansy Vanneman retreats to her childhood when she withdraws into the quiet, smooth envelope of her brain.

Technically, Stafford pursues the association between women and children throughout the short stories with imagery that highlights their shared estrangement. Those lonely, dependent women whom Abby Reynolds has joined in "The Children's Game" are described as pitiful children—"waifs" and "orphans." Mrs. Ramsey, in "The Captain's Gift," is, in her ignorance of reality, "like a child, who, dressed in her mother's clothes, is accepted as a grown-up," and finally, like Molly, and like all other children, even this "innocent child of seventy-five" must grow up. Angelica Early is encouraged to preserve her innocence, and is as a result like a child; she has a "girlish" and "innocent" mind, and her eyes have "retained the pale, melting blue of infancy." At the end of her sad career, Angelica welcomes her aunt by holding out her arms "like a child, to be embraced," but rejects the woman's gift of gloves with "infantile fury." And the aunt's pronouncement that "the child had no memories" is for the most part accurate. In "A Country Love Story," Daniel is ill and requires special care and consideration as he childishly withdraws from his wife and imagines her guilty actions. Yet, ironically, he continually refers to May as a child. He is described as a "professor catching out a student in a fallacy," and as "a tolerant father" who forgives the ignorant child who is unaware of its transgressions. With many other writers, one could simply comment upon the author's perception that women, when they act irrationally, are like children. But Stafford's insight into the complexities and problems of children forbids such a superficial interpretation. For Stafford, women and children, equally powerless and underestimated, share a fundamental alienation from the patriarchal society in which they live.

Thematically, too, Stafford explores the special alliance of women and children. Insentient and indolent, Mrs. Otis in "A Modest Proposal" has passed in the torpid Caribbean heat five of the six weeks that will grant her a divorce. Unamused by her hedonistic host, Captain Sundstrom, whose idea of charm is to entertain his guests with a yarn about "a perfectly cooked baby" that nearly provided the "tastiest dish of his life," Mrs. Otis wanders to the garden with the Captain's binoculars and peers at the beach; "almost at once, as if they had been waiting for her, there appeared . . . a parade of five naked Negro children leading a little horse exactly the color of themselves." She watches the children as they frolic in the water, trying—with eventual success—to ride the horse. A sudden, violent storm erupts, scattering the children and soaking Mrs. Otis, who accepts a towel from the Captain's abused, cringing kitchen boy. Vaguely she associates him with the children on the beach and the roasted baby of the Captain's tall tale: "She observed that he wore a miraculous medal under his open shirt. She looked into his eyes and thought, Angels and ministers of grace defend you. The gaze she met humbled her, for its sagacious patience showed that he knew his amulet protected him against an improbable world. His was all the sufferance and suffering of little children. In his ambiguous tribulation, he sympathized with her, and with great dignity he received the towel, heavy with rain, when she had dried herself." The transcendent moment of recognition and sympathy that Mrs. Otis and the native boy experience is a rapprochement that only kindred souls could share.

One of Stafford's most successful stories, "In the Zoo," offers another perspective on the theme of women and children. Reprising the frame technique of "A Winter's Tale," Stafford in this story develops her thesis about the lingering influence of childhood events in the first-person account of the dolorous childhood of two sisters who, years later, as middle-aged women, have not obliterated the scars of their youth.

Like many of Stafford's children, Daisy and the unnamed narrator, her sister, are orphans, who at ages eight and ten are "sent like Dickensian grotesqueries—cowardly, weakstomached, given to tears, backward in school," to a "possessive, unloving, scornful, complacent foster mother, Mrs. Placer," a boardinghouse operator whom Stafford ranks with Persis Galt on her "black list" of bad characters. As adults, the sisters live on opposite coasts, and as the story opens, the narrator is about to board her eastbound train in Denver after her biannual visit with Daisy, who has come from her home in the West to see her off. Awaiting the departure time in the Denver zoo, the pair recollect their childhoods in nearby Adams, an ugly, dreary town that spells unpleasant memories "with a legibility so insistent that you have only to say the name of the town aloud to us to rip the rinds from our nerves and leave us exposed in terror and humiliation." It is, they realize, not Adams itself so much as its associations with the suspicious, malevolent Mrs. Placer that make the memory so horrific. Although remunerated by their father's life insurance for raising the girls, Mrs. Placer plays the selfless martyr, and sacrifice, the narrator remarks, "was a word we were never allowed to forget."

The animals in the zoo trigger the flashback to the memory of a specific incident in the sisters' guilt-ridden past, when, to escape the cynical complaining of "Gran" and her boarders, the girls find solace in the company of Mr. Murphy, a quiet alcoholic who keeps a menagerie of a skunk, a parrot, and two monkeys. When Mr. Murphy gives them a puppy (which, amazingly, Gran allows them to keep), the sisters are thrilled. "He was our baby, our best friend, the smartest, prettiest, nicest dog in the entire world," rhapsodizes the narrator. But Laddy likes to roam, and when one day he returns from a "long hunting weekend in the mountains," Gran takes over, changing his name to Caesar and subjugating the dog as she has subjugated the girls, so that "before many weeks passed . . . he ceased to be anyone we had ever known." Mr. Murphy learns of Laddy's unwilling transformation into the vicious Caesar and confronts Gran, but before the man can vent his anger, Caesar attacks and kills one of his monkeys. Mr. Murphy has his revenge: the next day Caesar dies after eating poisoned meat. With Caesar dies the sisters' friendship with Mr. Murphy, and the girls remain in the insidious clutches of Gran. As they grow, the narrator writes, "Daisy and I lived in a mesh of lies and evasions, baffled and mean, like rats in a maze."

"Why did we stay until we were grown?" wonders the narrator aloud. The Great Depression; no money; no place to go, suggests Daisy, "but it had been infinitely harder than that, for Gran, as we now see, held us trapped by our sense of guilt. We were vitiated, and we had no choice but to wait, flaccidly, for her to die." The sisters escape eventually and never return to Adams, and the narrator assures us that the girls "did not unlearn those years as soon as we put her out of sight in the cemetery and sold her house for a song to the first boob who would buy it." Now, years later, thrust into that dreaded past, and reliving painful emotions, the narrator states:

We are heartbroken and infuriated and we cannot speak.

Two hours later, beside my train, we clutch each other as if we were drowning. We ought to go out to the nearest policeman and say, "We are not responsible women. You will have to take care of us because we cannot take care of ourselves." But gradually the storm begins to lull.

"You're sure you've got your ticket?" says Daisy. "You'll surely be able to get a roomette once you're on."

"I don't know about that," I say. "If there are any V.I.P.s on board, I won't have a chance. 'Spinsters and Orphans Last' is the motto of this line."

Affectionately, the women part, and on the train the narrator writes her customary parting letter to Daisy, which reaffirms that for them nothing can be as horrid—or, even now, as deleterious—as their childhoods with Gran.

As children, Daisy and her sister are typical Stafford characters. Orphans, like Lily in "Life Is No Abyss" and Jim Littlefield in "A Summer Day," they long for a conventional family life. Like Sonie and Emma, and like most of Stafford's other characters, young and old, the girls are misfits, out of place not only in Gran's petty world but in the larger world as well. Like Sonie, and Ralph and Molly, they are excluded from games at school; and they are conscious of their orphan status—a situation and a consciousness that are exacerbated by their sex: "'If only we were something besides kids! Besides girls!' mourned Daisy." As adults they can avoid Adams and delight in Gran's absence, but the damage is irrevocable. When, on the train, she finishes her letter to Daisy and moves to the window to view the passing scene, the narrator betrays the inexorable influence of the cynical old woman. "They are alfalfa fields, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are chockablock with marijuana," she muses. Her response to the recognition of her similarity to the dreaded Gran is silent laughter, "an unholy giggle," but the residue of Gran's contempt is not funny.

Another story of the exigencies of childhood, "Cops and Robbers," is deceptively complex, for it operates on several distinct levels. Like Henry James's What Maisie Knew, Stafford's story is a technical tour de force that presents a specifically adult situation (an unhappy marriage) from a child's point of view. It is as well a trenchant portrayal of a child's victimization by adults. Perhaps less apparently, "Cops and Robbers" compares the analogous situations of woman and child.

Five-year-old Hannah Talmadge, the youngest of five children, is the pampered pet of the family. Every morning she shares a grown-up colloquy with her mother, as the indolent woman leisurely brushes and curls her youngest daughter's long golden tresses. For a month Hannah has reveled in the attentions of a painter who labors each afternoon at a life-size portrait of the girl and her mother, with their identical silky curls. Hannah treasures her hair, for it alone guarantees her favored status as "the baby." In all else, she is an outsider in the family. Her siblings, ages ten through thirteen,

were all too old and busy to pay much attention to her . . . and when family photographs were taken, they were sometimes lined up according to height; these were called "stairstep portraits," and while Hannah, of course, was included, she was so much smaller than Janie that she spoiled the design, and one time Uncle Harry, looking at a picture . . . had said, pointing to Hannah, "Is that the runt of the litter or is it a toy breed?" Andy, who was Uncle Harry's pet, said, "We just keep it around the house for its hair. It's made of spun gold, you know, and very invaluable."

As the story begins, Hannah's raison d'être has been purloined and she, according to her mother, "has gone into a decline like a grown woman . .. sudden fits of tears for no apparent reason and then simply hours of brooding. She won't eat, she probably doesn't sleep." Hannah's misery is occasioned by a dramatic haircut, her father's vengeance against her mother after a particularly virulent argument. Now the portrait sessions, which were for both mother and daughter a calm hiatus from the intolerable life at home, are ended, and Hannah's position as the family doll is threatened. Her siblings no longer pamper the girl, and "she felt that she was already shrinking and fading, that all her rights of being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away. Chilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless, invisible." Her mother, preoccupied with her own bitterness, no longer lingers over her baby's curls, and Hannah wonders "how long they would keep her now that her sole reason for existence was gone."

Hannah, the innocent victim of her parents' ironically childish battles, is typical of Jean Stafford's young protagonists, who in their inexperience, are vulnerable to the insensitivity of adults. Yet, although she is the youngest of Stafford's protagonists, Hannah shares many of the characteristics of her creator's adult female heroes. Hannah and her mother are both victims of a tyrannical husband and father, a blustering bully who does not "countenance contradiction from his children. 'I' m an old-fashioned man,' he announced every morning to his three sons and two daughters. ''I am the autocrat of this breakfast table.' And though he said it with a wink and a chuckle, it was clear that he meant business." By the end of the story it is obvious that as Hannah's mother surmises, her daughter's predicament is a result of a displaced attack by her father on his wife. She moans to her sister, "How can one explain it away as an accident to a child when one perfectly knows that accident is not involved? Her misery makes me feel guilty. I am as shy of her as if I had been an accessory. I can't console her without spilling all the beans about Hugh. Besides, you can't say to a child, 'Darling, you are only a symbol. It was really my beautiful hair that was cut off, not yours.'" Hannah's mother is an accessory, but it is her father, Hugh, who bears the responsibility for Hannah's predicament. Her plight resembles not only her mother's but that of other women as well. Hannah could be Angelica Early at age five, treasured and applauded for her appearance, and learning that, without beauty, she is worth nothing to others.

Stafford captures the vicissitudes of childhood with wit and efficacy in a series of comic stories based on the experiences of Emily Vanderpool, a young resident of Adams, Colorado—a memorable character who, in her eccentricity and charm, is first cousin to Molly Fawcett. "A Reading Problem," which introduces Emily at age ten, begins, "One of the great hardships of my childhood—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have ever plagued a living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read." Cast out of their bedroom by her sister Stella, "one of the most vacant people I have ever known," who practices ballet steps and eampfire-girl songs; and banished from the library by a "fussbudgety" old librarian who "evicted children who popped their gum or cracked their knuckles, and I was a child who did both as a matter of course and constantly," Emily states that she cannot even find quiet anonymity in public places: "People . . . who are bored almost to extinction, think that everyone else is, too, and if they see someone reading a book, they say to themselves, 'I declare, here's somebody worse off than I am. The poor soul's really hard up to have to depend on a book, and it's my bounden Christian duty to help him pass the time,' and they start talking to you. If you want company on the streetcar or the interurban, open a book and you're all set." Emily tries and rejects the train depot, the Catholic church, and the mountains before discovering "a peachy place—the visitors' waiting room outside the jail in the basement of the courthouse. There were seldom any visitors because there were seldom any prisoners." So she spends her afternoons "more or less in jail," reading and memorizing the books of the Bible in hopes of winning a prize in Sunday School.

When one Saturday Emily arrives at the jail to find the sheriff, Mr. Starbird, burdened with some noisy prisoners, she is dislocated again. Wandering home, she rests by the creek in the tourist camp and is accosted by a strange, tall man in a black suit and a girl in a dirty nightgown who, spying her Bible, introduce themselves as traveling evangelists, father and daughter. The pair cross-examine Emily about her home and family in an obvious attempt to procure room and board for the night. And she, in her innocence, gives them the information. "It never occurred to me," she writes, "that I didn't have to answer questions put to me by adults . . . even strange ones who had dropped out of nowhere. Besides, I was always as cooperative as posible with clergymen, not knowing when my number might come up." The strangers have just convinced her to lead them to her father's market for a sack of groceries when the sheriff—"like the Mounties to the rescue"—arrives and, exposing the team as frauds, sends them on their way. The sheriff credits Emily with the capture of the "hillbilly fakers" and drives the proud girl home. Emily's escapade "put an end to my use of the jail as a library because copycats began swarming to the courthouse and making so much racket in the waiting room that Mr. Starbird couldn't hear himself think." Mr. Starbird apologizes to Emily for banishing her from her reading room, but, she writes:

He wasn't half as sorry as I was. The snake season was still on in the mountains; Mrs. Looby [the librarian] hated me; Aunt Joey was visiting, and she and Mother were using the living room to cut out Butterick patterns in; Stella had just got on to pig Latin and never shut her mouth for a minute. All the same, I memorized the books of the Bible and I won the New Testament, and I'll tell you where I did my work—in the cemetery, under a shady tree, sitting beside the grave of an infant kinswoman of the sheriff, a late-nineteenth-century baby called Primrose Starbird.

Emily is a year older in "The Scarlet Letter," but her life and her personality have grown no less troublesome. Virgil Meade is cursed with eyeglasses, and his valentine to Emily is insulting, but since "at that particular time I didn't have a friend to my name, having fought with everyone I knew, and the painful truth was that Virgil's valentine was positively the only one I got that year," she decides "that he was better than nobody" and accepts him as her beau. Their courtship, conducted over peanut butter, piccalilli, and mayonnaise sandwiches, reveals that "Virgil and I had a great deal in common; we both walked in our sleep and had often waked up just before we fell out of the window or down the stairs; both of us loved puzzles and card games and the two things in the world we really detested were Sunday school (Virgil said in so many words that he didn't believe in God) and geography homework."

Emily is bedazzled by Virgil's tales of bravado, his hip slang, and his corny jokes; and when he proposes a petition against geography homework, "which was really ruining our lives and the lives of everybody else in the sixth grade," Emily, "ever his slave," seconds the idea. She agrees, too, to Virgil's suggestion that she sign her name as the author of the petition and present it to Miss Holderness, the geography teacher, since her recent award of a school letter for reading gives her a status that he lacks. The smitten Emily follows Virgil's advice to be unique and sew the red letter on her sock instead of the more traditional sleeve. This action strikes her family as disrespectful, and their protestations unleash one of Emily's famous tantrums.

The devil at that moment made a conquest of my tongue and, blue in the face with fury, my eyes screwed shut, my fists clenched, I delivered a malediction in the roughest billingsgate imaginable, vilifying everyone at the table, all the teachers at Carlyle Hill, my uncles and aunts and cousins, my father's best friend, Judge Bay. The reaction was the same as it always was to one of my tantrums: appalled, fascinated, dead silence. When I was finished Jack [Emily's brother], awed, said: "Yippy-ki-yi! That was a humdinger of a one!" I threw my glass of water in his face and stamped out of the room. . . . Had anyone in the history of the world ever been so lamentably misunderstood?

The petition is only a modest success, since a surprising handful of sixth-graders refuses to sign, but with a majority of seventeen names, Emily appears at school on Monday morning to find Virgil Meade noticeably absent, leaving her to bear the responsibility for the petition alone. Not only must she endure a lecture by the principal, two weeks of extra homework from Miss Holderness, and banishment to her room by her mother, but she must bear her classmates' interpretation of the scarlet letter on her sock as a betrayal of school spirit. Virgil, in the meantime, in the flush of the popularity he has received in the backlash against Emily, eventually inadvertently admits that the "C" on the sock was his idea, and by the end of two weeks, Emily remarks, "I was in and Virgil was out. . . . Virgil, as it was fitting, was totally ostracized. In time I took pity on him; indeed, some months later, we again became boon companions, but I saw to it that he never hoodwinked me again: I ruled him with an iron glove and . . . ever after that Virgil Meade was the most tractable boon companion I had." In "The Scarlet Letter" Emily learns that she need be no one's slave; the lesson, albeit presented more comically than those of Rose Fabrizio, Polly Bay, and Lily Carpenter, is no less cogent.

Like "A Reading Problem" and "The Scarlet Letter," the story "Bad Characters" begins with a forthright, arresting proclamation. Emily confesses the dreadful affliction, a Poe-esque "imp of the perverse," that controls her life.

Up until I learned my lesson in a very bitter way, 1 never had more than one friend at a time, and my friendships, though ardent, were short. When they ended and I was sent packing in unforgetting indignation, it was always my fault; I would swear vilely in front of a girl I knew to be pious and prim (by the time I was eight, the most grandiloquent gangster could have added nothing to my vocabulary—I had an awful tongue), or I would call a Tenderfoot Scout a sissy or make fun of athletics to the daughter of the high-school coach. These outbursts came without plan; I would simply one day, in the middle of a game of Russian bank or a hike or a conversation, be possessed with a passion to be by myself, and my lips instantly and without warning would accommodate me. My friend was never more surprised than I was when this irrevocable slander, this terrible, talented invective, came boiling out of my mouth.

Afterward, when I had got the solitude I had wanted, I was dismayed, for I did not like it.

In "Bad Characters" Emily joins the ranks of rebels and misfits in Stafford's fiction. Her "difficult disposition" alienates her family as well as her friends, and she is more than a little proud of her prodigious temper. But Emily recognizes that she is out of her league when she catches Lottie Jump trying to steal a cake from the Vanderpools' kitchen. Nabbed in the act, the raggedy, ugly stranger pretends that she invaded Emily's house in search of a friend; Emily, who has recently irritated Virgil Meade ("I called him a son of a sea cook, said it was common knowledge that his mother had bedbugs and that his father, a dentist and the deputy marshal, was a bootlegger on the side"), welcomes the companionship. Lottie, who does not know the traditional games, suggests the more intriguing pastime of rifling Emily's mother's bureau drawers. Only after secretly pocketing a perfume flask does Lottie propose a friendship pact and a Saturday shoplifting trip—three days hence—to the five-and-dime. Emily is mesmerized, as she had been with Virgil Meade, by the waif's "gaudy, cynical" palaver and seduced by "the daring invitation to misconduct myself in so perilous a way. My life, on reflection, looked deadly prim; all I'd ever done to vary the monotony of it was to swear." Emily is, in short, smitten with her bold new friend.

The family uproar over the missing perfume flask and the chocolate cake (which Lottie liberates when, with the arrival of Emily's mother, she slips silently out the back door) unnerves Emily, and she is forced by circumstance into one of her ferocious tantrums to deflect attention from the thefts. But the diversion is temporary, and Emily, who "went to Sunday School and knew already about morality," is plagued with guilt over her impending crime.

I had a bad character, I know that, but my badness never gave me half the enjoyment Jack and Stella thought it did. A good deal of the time I wanted to eat lye. . . . I didn't want to go downtown to steal anything from the ten-cent store; I didn't want to see Lottie Jump again—not really, for I knew in my bones that that girl was trouble with a capital T. And still, in our short meeting she had mesmerized me; I would think about her style of talking and the expert way she had made off with the perfume flask and the cake . . . and be bowled over, for the part of me that did not love God was a blackhearted villain. And apart from these considerations, I had some sort of idea that if I did not keep my appointment with Lottie Jump, she would somehow get revenge; she had seemed a girl of purpose.

On Saturday, Emily and Lottie, who sports a tall, ridiculous hat, head downtown. And although Emily knows that Lottie looks absurd, and hopes that she will not see anyone she knows, "In another way," she confesses, "I was proud to be with her; in a smaller hemisphere, in one that included only her and me, I was swaggering—I felt like Somebody, marching along beside this lofty Somebody from Oklahoma who was going to hold up the dime store." The two are natural partners in crime; while Emily distracts the salesclerk, Lottie lifts (and secretes under her hat) rubber bands, a tea strainer, rubber gloves, and "four packages of mixed seeds." Then, as Lottie reaches for some beads, Emily's curious idiosyncrasy strikes, and suddenly feeling the need to be alone, she turns to and addresses Lottie and ruins the plan. Nonplussed, Lottie plays deaf and dumb, elicits the sympathy of the store manager and clerk, and leaves Emily—in a manner of speaking—holding the hat. Lottie disappears forever, while Emily endures the punishment of her father, the shame of her mother, and the teasing of her siblings. As the story ends, she reflects on her experience.

It is not true that you don't learn by experience. At any rate, I did that time. I began immediately to have two or three friends at a time—to be sure, because of the stigma on me, they were by no means the elite of Carlyle Hill Grade—and never again when the terrible need to be alone arose did I let fly. I would say, instead, "I've got a headache. I'll have to go home and take an aspirin," or "Gosh all hemlocks, I forgot—I've got to go to the dentist."

After the scandal died down, I got into the Camp Fire Girls. It was through pull, of course, since Stella had been a respected member for two years and my mother was a friend of the leader. But it turned out all right.

Stafford contradicts Emily's proclamation that she has a "bad character." For her, the bad characters are the truly wicked—Persis Galt and Mrs. Placer—while Emily, she writes, "is someone I knew well as a child; indeed, I often occupied her skin and, looking back, I think that while she was notional and stubborn and a trial to her kin, her talent for iniquity was feeble—she wanted to be a road-agent but hadn't a chance. Her trouble stemmed from the low company she kept, but she did not seek these parties out; they found her. It is a widespread human experience." Emily and those like her are, in Stafford's words, "victims."

So, although the lighthearted tone and comic events of the Emily Vanderpool stories distinguish them from the bulk of Stafford's fiction, they are fundamentally similar to her more serious explorations of the world of the young. Limited in understanding by their youth and lack of experience, and trapped in their situations by the emotional, financial, and social impotence that they share with the dispossessed, Stafford's children are prey to the enmity and indifference of adults and the protean fates of her "improbable world." If Stafford is sometimes ambivalent about women, her sympathy for the young—and for the orphaned waif in all of us—is unadulterated.