Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Caroline Gordon is ONE of those writers whose work has received careful attention only by a handful of perceptive critics. Yet this body of commentary, wrought by some of the best critics of modern fiction, is nonetheless inadequate for a writer of Miss Gordon's skill and scope. For, as in the best fiction of Faulkner, the levels of...