Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a full-time teacher/scholar and a full-time writer. To date, in addition to her scholarly articles and reviews, she has completed five novels, five books of poetry, and a volume of short stories. Her works have been reviewed in poetry magazines, the New York Times Book Review, and in several other publications, including Time, the New Yorker, and Saturday Review, but Schaeffer is still awaiting an extended critical evaluation which will attempt to assess the importance of her total achievement.

Schaeffer's imaginative range is impressive. She has worked successfully in both poetry and fiction and has tried major experiments within each genre. She is attracted to realism and fantasy; her material is sometimes based on historical or biographical fact, sometimes pure invention. She ranges in historical time and geographical space from nineteenth-century New England (Time in Its Flight) to Poland at the time of...