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 stories published between World War II and the late 1960s]…. It would be a shame if whatever short fiction she wrote or published in the last decade of her life were to go ungathered [such as a 1978 story in the New Yorker which brimmed with her characteristic gifts]. A future reissuance of her collected stories would be, one hopes, a slightly fatter volume. Until that time, however, the stories of this collection will have to speak for her—which they do splendidly, in a voice at once graceful, tart, wise, and winsome.
Brad Leithauser, "Brief Reviews: 'The Collected Short Stories of Jean Stafford'," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1980 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 182, No. 22, May 31, 1980, p. 40.
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