Elizabeth Spencer (writer)


Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She wrote a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir, and a play. Her novella The Light in the Piazza was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She was a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Spencer's themes relate to tension between the individual and the group, and deal with how family or community ties support but also bind the individual's identity. She writes about this as it concerns the inner lives of her female characters, many of whom struggle to establish a fruitful life independent of society's narrow restrictions.
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Early life and career

Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at J. Z. George High School. She earned her BA at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi and a master's in literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943. At Vanderbilt, Spencer studied with Donald Davidson.
Spencer taught at the junior college level at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi for two years, then accepted a job with the Nashville Tennessean, but she soon returned to teaching, this time at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1953, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and left Mississippi to live in Italy and pursue writing full-time.
Her third novel, begun in Florence, Italy, The Voice at the Back Door, was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1957. The prize ultimately wasn't awarded that year.
After her first three novels set in Mississippi, Spencer's career foundered for a while, for she was seen as a "Southern woman" writer, and not a literary figure. In 1981 Spencer published her collected Stories, with a foreword by Eudora Welty, and her standing was reestablished among critics, who took another look at her contributions.

Personal life

While in Italy, she met and married John Rusher of Cornwall, England. The couple moved to Montreal, Quebec in 1956, where they remained until moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1986. She taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until her retirement. Rusher died in 1998, and Spencer continued to live in her Chapel Hill home until her death on 22 December 2019.
Spencer, through her mother's family, was a cousin of United States senator John McCain.

Awards and honors

Works

Novels

Fire in the Morning This Crooked Way The Voice at the Back Door Knights and Dragons No Place for an Angel The Snare The Salt Line
  • ''The Night Travellers''

Short story collections

Ship Island and Other Stories The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer Marilee: Three Stories Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories On the Gulf The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales The Southern Woman
  • ''Starting Over''

Memoir

  • ''Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir''

Play

  • ''For Lease or Sale''

Collection

Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories: The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories