Jean Stafford has defined the role of the novelist as that of telling the truth: "the problem is how to tell the truth so persuasively and vividly that our readers are taken in and made to believe that the tale is true, that these events have happened and could happen again and do happen everywhere all the time." Firmly rooted within the forms of the traditional, realistic novel of Flaubert and James and the post-Joycean short story, as well as within the conventional expression of American experience and themes in a period of literary innovation and social change, Stafford's contribution to American letters is in the truth that she has told and in the sureness of the telling. Although neither a feminist nor the "exceptional and original feminine talent" she was labeled in a major review of her first novel, she is a woman writer who portrays real...