STAFFORD, Jean

Born 1 July 1915, Covina, California; died 26 March 1979, White Plains, New York

Daughter of John and Mary McKillop Stafford; married Robert Lowell, 1940; Oliver Jensen, 1950; A. J. Liebling, 1959 (died 1963)

Jean Stafford spent her childhood in California and Colorado. She received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Colorado and did postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg (1936-37). Stafford was married three times: to the poet Robert Lowell; to Oliver Jensen, staff photographer for Life; and to A. J. Liebling, a writer associated with the New Yorker. Liebling died in 1963. Stafford's literary achievement was recognized early and rewarded by several grants and prizes.

Boston Adventure (1944), Stafford's first published novel, is an ironic story of a lonely child. After years of daydreams of escaping the hostility of her own chaotic home by living with the impeccable, wealthy Miss Pride of Boston, Sonie Marburg, daughter of poor immigrants, has her dream come true. Sonie learns Miss Pride's world is not as simple or as superior as she had imagined. Despite some ambivalence and a sense that the price of order and peace may be high (paid for, perhaps, by a loss of spontaneity and "normal" love), Sonie commits herself to Miss Pride and her well-ordered world. Freudian overtones suggest Sonie's choice is unfortunate, but at the same time, Stafford conveys well the dearth of options women have to shape their lives. Although some critics consider the prose uneven, Boston Adventure was well-received and remains in print.

Stafford's most successful novel, The Mountain Lion (1947), set partly in a middle class home in Covina and partly in the rougher, simpler atmosphere of a Colorado cattle ranch, is primarily the story of Ralph Fawcett's coming of age. Traditional in its insistence that entering the male adult world requires courage, skill, and loss of innocence, The Mountain Lion is also the story of Ralph's sister Molly's failure to achieve initiation, of her refusal to accept realities of the flesh or tolerate adult compromise with banality. Thus the book ultimately resists the traditional simplicities of initiation, revealing certain mindless aspects of the male adult world and the fact that in such a world females must be ruthlessly excluded and may even be sacrificed.

The Catherine Wheel (1952) tells of the strength, order, and beauty—as well as of the isolation, jealousy, guilt, and fear—engendered by unrequited love. Stafford explores two kinds of disappointed love: between men and women, and between friends. This is also a story of delayed maturity, painfully achieved only after the protagonists realize those they love are unworthy. Although the novel has been criticized because it is stylized and overly populated with grotesques, it retains the power to charm and to raise uncomfortable questions about the value of requited and unrequited love.

Stafford contributed short stories to a wide range of magazines, particularly to the New Yorker, and published several collections. Collected Stories (1969) contains most of the short fiction she published from 1945 through 1968. In 1970 it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The stories are arranged in four geographic groupings, dealing generally with Americans abroad, the New England area, the West, and Manhattan. Stafford considers most frequently the lonely—those few with strength to carve narrow places for themselves and those who fail even at this, strangers in strange lands, physically or spiritually isolated or trapped in hollow social rituals with people who are sometimes thoughtless and cruel.

Most effective are the stories set in Adams, Colorado: to these Stafford brings not only impressive narrative skill but also a warmth, range of tone, and richness of observation not so apparent elsewhere in her work. Such a story is "The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies," which gives us middle class women down on their luck and making the best of it; another is "In the Zoo," which gives us a longer perspective on the lives of the sensitive children and adolescents Stafford so successfully draws.

In evaluating Stafford's achievement in Collected Stories, one may also evaluate her general achievement, which is considerable. Although she was criticized for some preciousness and for including selections that seem closer to sketches than stories, she was rightly praised by the Pulitzer Committee for "her range in subject, scene and mood" and for her "mastery of the short story form." She achieves here, as in much of her work, what she argued writers should try for: the vivid presentation of truth without moral judgement.