A Spinster's Tale | Literary Criticism & Book Review

A Spinster's Tale Critical Overview

In 1948 the great American author, Robert Penn Warren, wrote an introduction to A Long Fourth, and Other Stories, Taylor's first collection of short fiction. In the essay, Warren places "A Spinster's Tale" within the context of Taylor's fiction, highlighting both the importance of family as well as the presence of a first person narrator.

Taylor's best work, Warren writes, employs "a natural style, one based on conversation and the family tale, with the echo of the spoken word, with the texture of some narrator's mind."

In a review in the New York Times Book Review that same year, the reviewer also lauds Taylor's short fiction, commenting that "A Spinster's Tale" mirrors "the deterioration of family life . . . through a girl's developing neurosis. . . ."

In a lengthy essay which appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1962, the writer...
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