SOURCE: "Wallace Stegner's Art of Literary Allusion: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Faust in 'Maiden in a Tower'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring, 1980, pp. 105-11.

In the following essay, Ellis examines the life-in-death and death-in-life metaphor in the story "Maiden in a Tower. " The critic also argues that literary reference in this story to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Faust help explain the importance of the unconsummated sexual encounter that the main character Kimball remembers and why this constitutes a "failure" on Kimball's part.

In one of the few critical essays to appear on Wallace Stegner, Robert Canzoneri has touched briefly on "the life-death and civilized-natural themes" in the stories of The City of the Living. Drawing particular attention to "Maiden in a Tower," he points to the story as an example of Stegner's concern with the inability to love ["Wallace...