The Southern Woman Selected Fiction

A stunning collection of stories from “one of the foremost chroniclers of the American South” (The Washington Post), including the novella “Light in the Piazza”—featuring an introduction by Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women
 
Over the course of a fifty-year career, Elizabeth Spencer wrote masterly, lyrical fiction about southerners. An outstanding storyteller who was unjustly denied a Pulitzer for her anti-racist novel The Voice at the Back Door despite being the unanimous choice of the judges, she is recognized as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction, infusing her work with elegant precision and empathy. 

The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer’s short stories, displaying her range of place—the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after World War II, the gray-sky North, and, finally, the contemporary Sun Belt.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance

Elizabeth Spencer (1921–2019) was the author of nine novels and novellas and three other short-story collections. She was raised in Mississippi, where tales of the Civil War lingered and segregation seemed permanent, during the Great Depression. Spencer’s wanderings took her to Italy in 1953, to Montreal in 1958, and back to the South in 1986.