Elizabeth Spencer (1921-2019) was the author of nine novels and novellas and three other short-story collections. She was raised in Mississippi, where tales of the Civil War lingered and segregation seemed permanent, during the Great Depression. Spencer's wanderings took her to Italy in 1953, to Montreal in 1958, and back to the South in 1986.

Born in rural Carrollton, Mississippi, Elizabeth Spencer has been writing masterly stories and novellas about Southerners for more than half a century. The Southern Woman collects the best of Spencer's shorter fiction and displays her range of place-the agrarian South, Italy in the decade after the Second World War, the gray-sky North, and the contemporary Sun Belt. In "The Little Brown Girl,” Maybeth discovers the limits of friendship in a racially divided world. In the elegiac "The Cousins,” a group of Southerners roams through Italy, brushing with love and regret and the grip of family. Also included is "The Light in the Piazza,” the novella about an American woman and her daughter in Florence that brought Spencer widespread acclaim and was adapted for both the screen and the Broadway stage. In this capstone collection, Elizabeth Spencer firmly claims her place in the distinguished heritage of the Southern short story.