SOURCE: "Domesticated Modernism," in The New Republic, Vol. 160, No. 10, March 8, 1969, pp. 25-7.

In the following review of The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, Dickstein compares Stafford's style and themes to those of American writer Henry James.

To do justice to the stories of Jean Stafford, even to her recent ones; we need a degree of historical sympathy. They take us back to a time in the 1940's when Henry James was an insurgent influence among American writers, when ethnic writers had not yet transmitted the brooding vitality of their subcultures into the center of our imaginative awareness. Miss Stafford's elegant and sad Wasp Manhattan is closer to Washington Square than to Seize the Day. Her lonely Americans abroad match their gauche innocence against European civility and corruption. She writes Jamesian social comedies and Jamesian horror-stories and tales as monitory and symbolic as his artist-fables, part observation, part parable...