Sunday, September 9, 2018

Jean Stafford The Savage Heart

I’ve read the Collected Stories of Jean Stafford and The Mountain Lion. (I still need to read The Boston Adventure.)  She is a pretty much-forgotten writer from the 50’s which is sad as she was quite good.  I decided to read a biography of her since I was curious about her.  This book concentrates on her turbulent marriage to poet Robert Lowell and her problems with alcoholism.  It’s sad to read the final parts of the book as she was suffering from writer’s block for years.  I liked how the biographer went into detail about many of her short stories including ones which for some reason weren’t put in the Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.  Some of them sounded cool.  I don’t think we’ll be seeing a complete stories collection though. Unfortunately, the biographer didn’t put the short stories mentioned in the index.  I was thinking in the future that I might want to read the collected stories again and contrast the stories with what the biographer had to say but I can’t do that. 

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