Novels & Stories: The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories

by Elizabeth Spencer, Michael Gorra (Editor)

Elizabeth Spencer has been called “a national treasure” (Richard Bausch) and “a writer one puts on the ‘permanent’ shelf” (James Dickey). Often linked with fellow Mississippians William Faulkner and Eudora Welty—the latter once remarked that “Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hilltown down to the bone”—she also crafted nuanced portrayals of expatriate Americans in Europe that invite comparison to Henry James. This Library of America volume gathers the best writing from a career that spanned six decades: three novels and nineteen stories that reveal as never before the full range and stature of her accomplishments.

The Voice at the Back Door (1956) is a shrewd and sensitive look at racial politics in a quiet Mississippi town during the late Jim Crow era, a novel that anticipates Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The breakneck plot is set in motion when Duncan Harper, a shopkeeper and former football star more open-minded than anyone suspects, accepts the job of sheriff, pushing the town of Lacey toward crisis. The judges for the Pulitzer Prize unanimously recommended Spencer’s novel for the award in fiction, but the Pulitzer board declined to make an award that year, perhaps for fear that Spencer’s racial subject matter was too incendiary for the national climate at the time.

The two years that Spencer spent in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship inspired The Light in the Piazza (1960), her most famous work, adapted for the screen by Guy Green and into a Tony Award–winning musical by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas. Set in Florence and permeated by the city’s atmosphere and light, it is a comic, deft, and poignant novel about a wealthy American woman whose attempt to marry her beautiful daughter to a handsome young Florentine conceals a wrenching secret. It is joined here by Knights and Dragons (1965), described by Spencer as a “dark companion” to The Light in the Piazza, in which an American woman, haunted by the specter of her domineering ex-husband, travels to Rome in search of a new life.

Spencer was a prolific and prodigiously talented short story writer. The selection presented here demonstrates her mastery of the form, ranging from the early, ghostly “First Dark” (1959), a gothic tale about a history-haunted love affair in a small southern town, to the valedictory “The Wedding Visitor” (2013), about one man’s refusal to let the all-enveloping world of place, family, and childhood define his adult life.

Genres: Fiction

863 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2021

About the author

Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She has written a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir (Landscapes of the Heart, 1998), and a play (For Lease or Sale, 1989). Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a review of The Voice at the Back Door only. I haven’t read this whole volume yet, but added it so I could access my highlights.

4.5

The Voice at the Back Door is of its time (the ‘50s)—which isn’t to say it’s not relevant; unfortunately, it is—perfectly capturing a small Mississippi town, called Lacey in the novel.

Spencer is an “old-fashioned” novelist in that she writes from the viewpoints of several members of the community, black and white, and none of them with authorial intrusion. After finishing, I thought of Eudora Welty and I’m not surprised that Welty admired Spencer. Their styles are different, but they share the same preoccupations, including the (dark) history of their shared state. Only once did I sense an overall narratorial voice. The starting point is a character thinking of how the gathering to hear election speeches has a similar feel to a pregame rally for the college football team, one in which a “Rebel yell” will arise amidst the crowd. Perfection.

The racial slur used throughout the book comes out of characters’ mouths casually and maliciously. It’s hard to read, and I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to hear. Of course Spencer’s hometown of Carrollton, Mississippi, didn’t like this book. If it wasn’t challenged/banned then, it likely would be now: It’s part of the cover-up.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A treasured writer who turned out finely observed and intricate stories both as "Southern" writer and expatriate in Italy. but I think the perfect short stories might be better than the novels (which include Light in the Piazza- made into a broadway musical). Adding her work alongside Eudora Welty in the American grain makes a lot of sense. Her women characters find their way to freedoms despite but also because of the southern moral environments they inhabit.

[Lyle Krewson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished the first novel in this volume, set in the Jin Crow south of the 50's. Very searing, a new writer for me, in a genre I have enjoyed so much...the Southern Renaissance.