The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is, you guessed it, a collection of short stories by, that's right, Jean Stafford.
Stafford wrote three novels but was most famous for the short stories that she wrote in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. This collection is organized in four groups. The first grouping, "The Innocents Abroad", deals with American visitors to Europe. Second group "The Bostonians" focuses on life in Boston, third group "Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains" revolves around life in Colorado and the West (Stafford in her youth attended the University of Colorado at Boulder), and final grouping "Manhattan Island" features stories set in Big Applesauce. Most of her stories feature female protagonists, many have protagonists who are someplace new or someplace where they don't belong, and many deal with feelings of loneliness or depression.
Tropes:
- Angsty Surviving Twin: In "The Echo and the Nemesis", Sue and Ramona are university students together, and Sue is accustomed to listen to Martha's ramblings about her field of study (linguistics). Ramona catches Sue by surprise when a random song causes Ramona to remember her twin sister Martha, beloved of the family, an ill girl that died at age 16. (At the end this trope is subverted when it's revealed that Ramona is making Martha up.)"The death of a twin is a foretaste of one's own death, and for months she had been harried with premonitions and prophetic dreams."
- Be Careful What You Wish For: In "Beatrice Trueblood's Story", Beatrice is sniping with her fiance when she says she's done talking with him, and she tells him "I will not hear another word." She wakes up the next morning totally deaf.
- The Casino: In "The Children's Game" an American named Abby Reynolds is touring a Belgian casino. She is disappointed at it being rather threadbare and not at all like the depictions of places like Monte Carlo in the movies.
- Continuity Nod: Emily Vanderpool, who first appeared in "Bad Characters" when she made an unfortunate friend who was fond of petty theft, pops up again in "A Reading Problem". She's a teenager now and she's having problems finding a quiet place to read.
- Dead Sparks: "A Country Love Story", in which Daniel and May go off to live in a country house after he spent a significant amount of time at a sanatorium, trying to recover from TB. May is surprised to discover that their love is pretty much dead.
- Death by Despair: "The End of a Career". Angelica is a beautiful woman whose whole sense of identity and self-worth was tied up in being gorgeous. So when her looks start to go in her late forties, she can't deal with it. She falls into profound depression, retreats to her home, stops seeing anyone...and eventually just dies.
- Dirty Old Man: In "The Bleeding Heart" Rose, in her early 20s, becomes intrigued with an older man she sees at the library and begins to imagine him as a foster father. When she finally meets him, however, he turns out to be a creepy weirdo who suggests that she call him "Daddy".
- Divorce in Reno: Alluded to in "The Maiden", when Evan, at a party in occupied Germany soon after his breakup with wife Virginia, "shuddered to think how she must be maligning him in Nevada to the other angry petitioners."
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: In "The Tea-Time of Stouthearted Ladies", Kitty's mother takes in boarders in their dilapidated Colorado home, because her father can't find work in the Depression and her family is broke. Her mother still puts on the airs of the upper class, which Kitty can't stand.
- Fish out of Water:
- Maggie in "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience", a simple if wealthy girl from Tennessee, is deeply uncomfortable when she winds up in France with members of the European jet set.
- Emma from "Children Are Bored on Sunday" feels similarly out of place with the sophisticates of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit, and has started to avoid them.
- Framing Device: The opening of "In the Zoo" has two middle-aged sisters meeting, that's right, at the zoo. They wind up reminiscing about their childhood, decades ago, when they were orphaned and sent off to live with their mean, unfriendly godmother.
- The Gambling Addict: Hugh from "The Children's Game" is a gambling addict who in the past lost all his money and his wife due to an addiction to roulette.
- High-Class Glass: A German at the fancy casino described in "The Children's Game" wears a monocle even though his face is "as scarred as the moon." In the same story an old lady glares at Abby using the female equivalent of the High Class Glass, the lorgnette (glasses on a stick).
- Historical Domain Character: In "Children Are Bored on Sunday", protagonist Emma goes wandering through the Metropolitan Museum and bumps into Salvador Dalí himself. She's preoccupied enough that it takes her a moment to recognize him.
- Idle Rich: In "The Mountain Day", Judy's father reflects that if he hadn't been born rich, he might have been a bum.
- Incest Subtext: "The Hope Chest" is about Rhoda Bellamy, an 82-year-old woman who never married. She remembers how her father was disappointed in her failure to find a husband. However, a memory from when she was much younger hints at something darker: as a girl she got excited when her father hung mistletoe for Christmas, she said no girl in the world could want "more than a beau like you", and she remembers her father giving her a peignoir.
- ISO-Standard Urban Groceries: In "The Captain's Gift", Mrs. Ramsey the old widow likes to look down and watch the business of the square outside her apartment. She looks down and sees a boy who is "carrying a string shopping bag with a long loaf of bread sticking out of it."
- It Kind of Looks Like a Face: Abby is not impressed with the architecture in the Belgian resort of Knokke-Heist, noting that many of the houses look like "faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes." (from story "The Children's Game")
- Lady Drunk: Emma from "Children Are Bored on Sunday" has been spending months mired in depression, drinking heavily and avoiding human contact.
- Lonely Together: In "Children Are Bored on Sunday", Emma, who has been depressed and avoiding human contact, notices a casual acquaintance named Alfred at the museum. At first she avoids him, but when he spots her she eagerly accepts an invitation to go drinking (they're both depressed alcoholics) because they can share their loneliness and depression with each other."To mingle their pain, their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience."
- The Mistress: Mme. Floquet is "dependent on her livelihood on the largess of a moody Danish lover." (from "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience")
- MRS Degree: An entire school devoted to this, the Alma Hettrick College for Girls, in story "Caveat Emptor". Its mission statement is "to turn out the wives and mothers of tomorrow." There are classes like "Marriage and the Family" and the Personality Clinic where girls learn flattering hairstyles. Malcolm and Victoria, two young intellectuals hired to teach there after getting their masters' degrees, are brought together by their shared disgust for the place.
- National Geographic Nudity: Mrs. Otis, a guest at the villa of a white man on an unnamed Caribbean island, sees "five naked Negro children" with a horse on the beach. The whole story is a meditation on the horrible racism of white settlers in the Caribbean.
- Noodle Incident:
- In "Children Are Bored on Sunday", Emma has been drinking heavily, mired in depression, and avoiding people. There's no hint as to why this might be other than an oblique reference that "she was no longer mutilated." Jean Stafford was badly injured in a car accident as she was being driven by her lover, Robert Lowell, and suffered injuries that included having to have her nose reattached.
- In "The Hope Chest", "there had not, in the history of Boston society, been a greater fiasco than Rhoda Bellamy’s debut." Just what that fiasco was is unexplained.
- Old-Fashioned Rowboat Date: In "A Country Love Story", Daniel and May, spending time in their country house, go boating on the lake, with Daniel rowing while May gathers lilies. But it's ironic in that this is when May first senses the growing distance between the two of them.
- Old Maid: The protagonist of "The Hope Chest" is Miss Rhoda Bellamy, an 82-year-old woman who is sitting at home on a cold day, pondering how she never married.
- Shout-Out:
- The first section of stories, dealing with the experiences of Americans in Europe, is titled "The Innocents Abroad", after Mark Twain's humorous travelogue of that title about a European tour.
- One story has two Jerkass men antagonizing a sensitive woman in their company by making a series of horribly racist remarks that ends with them "joking" about eating black babies. The story is called "A Modest Proposal".
- Small Town Boredom: Polly in "The Liberation" hates Adams County, Colorado, and longs to escape to the East.
- Title Drop:
- Abby says of the Belgian resort town she's staying in, Knokke-le-Zoute, that "it sounds like a children's game." The real children's game, as she's found out, is roulette.
- "The Maiden" turns out to be a guillotine in Scotland (in the story, a lawyer tells of witnessing an execution by guillotine).
- "The Mountain Day": Judy's father describes the clear, sunny weather on a particular Colorado Sunday as "a mountain day".
- Total Eclipse of the Plot: In "The Darkening Moon" Ella, a 12-year-old girl out in Colorado, watches a lunar eclipse, which she didn't know was going to happen. She is made uneasy by how all the wilderness animals go strangely quiet.
- Toxic Friend Influence: "Bad Characters" centers around Emily, a little girl who makes friends with a girl named Lottie. Lottie introduces Emily to the joys of shoplifting and eventually gets her into trouble.
- Traumatic Haircut: Hannah from "Cops and Robbers" is a little five-year-old girl who has her beautiful long blonde hair cut off when her father takes her to the barber's. The haircut was another nasty battle in the awful, dysfunctional marriage of her horrible alcoholic parents. Hannah is deeply embarrassed.
- Weight Woe: Ramona from "The Echo and the Nemesis" is hugely overweight, and shamefacedly admits to Sue that she came to Europe not really to study, but in hopes of losing the weight while being away from her disapproving family.
