Elizabeth Spencer: July 21, 1921–December 22, 2019

Elizabeth Spencer, born in Carrollton, Mississippi, author of nine novels, eight short story collections, a memoir, and a play, met Eudora Welty shortly after A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) was published.¹ Spencer, a student at Belhaven College across the street from Welty's home, invited the local author to her writing group, and as Welty tells the story in her foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, "It would have been unneighborly to stay home" ([xvii]). Welty says of that first meeting that Spencer

was indeed already a writer.

As a matter of fact, she was all but the first writer I'd ever met, and the first who was younger than I was. (The other was Katherine Anne Porter.) Elizabeth offered me my first chance to give literary advice. But my instinct protected us both. This free spirit, anybody could tell, would do what she intended to do about writing. What else, and what better could a writer know of another writer? It was all I was sure of about myself. I imagine she was glad not to get advice.

Instead of advising each other, we became friends.

(Foreword [xvii]–xviii)

Theirs was a friendship that lasted a lifetime. In her memoir, Landscapes of the Heart, Spencer remarks, "An amazing aspect of Eudora's life is how personal, despite her fame, she is able to keep all her relationships. It never seems to enter her mind to be anything but her own Jackson, Mississippi, self. This intimate quality enters her writing and gives it much of its appeal" (168). Whenever they were to meet by planning or coincidence, Welty noted, "We knew right where to take up the conversation" (Foreword xviii).

Spencer and Welty were more than friends. While they may not have given one another advice, they nonetheless shared professional lives. In addition to the foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, Welty provided dustjacket blurbs for Spencer's first three novels. Of Fire in the Morning (1948), Welty wrote, "Elizabeth Spencer's talent is fresh and new. There is health and vigor in her work. It has depth, power, serenity, humor, variety. She seems to be one of the natural novel writers, moving about freely and surely in the world of her story," and for This Crooked Way (1952), "To me this book more than fulfills the natural expectations aroused by Fire in the Morning. She shows such scope, such power, and such control over her material … that her first rate talent, discernable from the first, remains and grows as a source of constant interest and pleasure for the reader" (qtd. in McDonald 8). Of The Voice at the Back Door (1956), Welty wrote, "It has never once been doubted that Elizabeth Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hilltown down to the bone. This she transforms by the accuracy of her eye and ear, the penetration of her talent, and a certain prankish gaiety of spirit into a vital and absorbing novel" (qtd. in McDonald 9).

For her part, Spencer dedicated her first story collection Ship Island and Other Stories (1968) to Welty and later told an interviewer, "I can never look back to a time before I read … The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty—it's become part of my life, part of my experience" ("Elizabeth" 168). Spencer also commented in a unique way about Welty's sense of place. After responding to an interviewer about the setting in her novels having "a spirit," Spencer continued,

That has always seemed to me to be at the edge, though unsaid, of Eudora Welty's thinking about place. To me, the pagan and the Christian are never very far apart. And I think there's a pagan belief that's common in southern writers. Place is sacred. There's a spirit there to be worshipped or violated. I think this feeling, though she never goes so far as to say so, is at the heart of Eudora's work. She keeps it on the level of the permeation of observation and the like, but I do think that in the stories like those...