Elizabeth Spencer

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Spencer, Elizabeth (1921– ),Mississippi‐born novelist, resident for some time in Italy. Since 1958 she and her husband have lived in Canada. Her first novels, Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), and The Voice at the Back Door (1956), are set in her native state and in various ways contrast established and new modes of life in the Old South. Her next novels, The Light in the Piazza (1960) and Knights and Dragons (1965), both set in Italy, are very brief works sensitively dealing with Americans in Italy. Like her earlier fiction they are distinguished by fine craftsmanship and intense plots that reveal the essential natures of the characters. The Snare (1972) is a longer, more complex novel set in the underworld of New Orleans, while the recently hurricane‐wrecked region of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in The Salt Line (1984) is symbolic of its resident characters' lives. Stories are collected in Ship Island (1968), The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981), and Jack of Diamonds (1988), while Marilee (1981) groups three stories about the maturing of a girl in the deep South.