For the first time in a deluxe hardcover edition, three eerily powerful novels by a midcentury master of social satire and
psychological portraiture
Jean Stafford (1915-1979) made a bold entrance onto the American literary scene in 1944 when her first novel,
Boston Adventure
became a surprise best seller. She followed up this initial success with two more acclaimed novels,
The Mountain Lion
(1944) and
The Catherine Wheel
(1952), and became a prolific writer of short stories for
The New Yorker
and other prominent magazines. (Her
Collected Stories
won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970.) In later years serious health problems made it increasingly difficult for her to write, and after her death she became a somewhat overlooked figure in 20th-century American literature.
Complete Novels
allows readers to rediscover "a figure of genuine consequence in American literature" (Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post
) at the height of her powers.
follows Sonia Marburg, the daughter of immigrant parents, as she seeks to escape her impoverished childhood by becoming the secretary-companion of the socially prominent Lucy Pride. The novel won praise for its perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society, while Stafford's portrayal of the inner life of her protagonist drew comparisons to Henry James and Marcel Proust. In
Stafford drew on her childhood memories of southern California and Colorado to tell the story of Molly Fawcett, her brother Ralph, and their shared journey through the treachero's passage from childhood into adolescence. Set in a country house in Maine,
traces the tragic relationship between a lonely boy and his beloved aunt during a summer in which each of them secretly seeks revenge against the people who have betrayed them.