What makes [Jean Stafford's] work so rewarding is in part her flair for the particular, the vivid detail…. Stafford's dialogue often shows a quirky perfection, like the student at Harrow who announces, "I'm a fauna man, not a flora man." Yet her greatest gift, and what made her a nonpareil of sorts, was her complex yet seemingly effortless use of language. Her language was an odd, unpromisingly heterogeneous mix: homespun colloquialisms ("chockablock," "spang in the middle," "flibbertigibbet"), long and sometimes obscure latinisms ("logorrhea," "machicolations"), sprinklings of French and German, unadorned monosyllables (a wailing child's mouth as "a rent of woe"), and clichés, which she somehow re-burnished as if newly minted…. She had a poet's love of musical sound. The stories abound in rhymes …, [homonyms], and dozens of near-rhymes and near homonyms….

I have one tentative complaint, or doubt, about [The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, which includes...