The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford

This searching, comprehensive portrait of the witty, troubled novelist and short story writer whose work and life captured the dark spirit of a particular place and time--New York literary circles of mid-century--is disappointingly flat. Hulbert, a senior editor at the New Republic , traces her subject's childhood in Colorado and California, probing Stafford's uneasy family relationships, particularly with her father, a failed writer, and follows the writer East and into her marriages to Robert Lowell, Oliver Jensen and A. J. Liebling. Throughout, events in Stafford's life, including long stays in psychiatric institutions and her struggles with alcohol, are related to her writing, with clarification drawn from her correspondence with such friends as Peter Taylor. While Hulbert illuminates the painful conflicts of Stafford's efforts to remain true to her literary calling and find peace in her everyday life, that dilemma is still most clearly expressed in the problems Stafford poses, and does not solve, for the characters in her stories. Stafford was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her collected short stories in 1970; she died in 1979 at the age of 64. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection. (May)