The mood of Caroline Gordon's short stories [in The Collected Stories] is just this side of elegiac. Here is not a lament for the dead, but rather an evocation of a world that is passing away, a celebration of things enjoyed in every particular precisely because they will not come again. It is not just the inevitability but the propriety of time's passage that Miss Gordon's narratives acknowledge. For her the changing world is cherished in its details, arrested for a moment in an image or a comment but then released to its flux. (pp. 789-90)

Written over a span of some forty years, Miss Gordon's stories reveal from first to last a reverence for specificity, the feel and look of things. Even in one of the most recent and heretofore uncollected pieces, "A Walk with the Accuser," where Miss Gordon turns to the theological debates of the...