<p>Since 1944 when she published her first story Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty Chopin and Mansfield. <em>The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction</em> her first collection in almost fifteen years restores to print the author’s most masterful stories and novellas including <em>The Light in the Piazza</em>—and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time. This collection celebrates a six-decade career devoted to the art of the story and the novella—a literary event for the lover of short fiction.</p>