SOURCE: “Tradition and an Individual Talent,” in her The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist, University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 1-22.

In the following essay, Bauer analyzes the development of Gilchrist's story cycle and her relationship to the short-story tradition.

No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. And I must also consider her—this unknown woman [writer]—as the descendant of all those other women whose circumstances I have been glancing at and see what she inherits of their characteristics and restrictions.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

I...