Jean Wilson Stafford, a brilliant practitioner of the craft of fiction, has few equals among the post-World War II generation of novelists and short-story writers who worked within the literary modes and conventions of the realistic tradition. Early in her career, in a lecture on "The Psychological Novel" delivered at Bard College in 1947, she defined the role of the novelist as that of telling the truth: "the problem is how to tell the story 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." Accepting as given that the writer can "know that our perceptions are accurate and that only one set of conclusions can be drawn from them," she saw the writer's problem as one of technique: "how to communicate the findings perceptively and conclusively." In a period of literary innovation Stafford's fiction remained firmly rooted within the formal structure of the traditional, realistic novel of Gustave Flaubert and Henry James and the post-Joycean short story.
