Introduction Backward Glances and Forward Thinking: Reconsidering Elizabeth Spencer

Abstract

I first encountered Elizabeth Spencer’s work in a graduate seminar on southern literature. Her widely anthologized 1959 story “First Dark” was the last work we read in the course, and, to my mind, it functioned as an improbably tidy capstone for the semester that had preceded it: although a relatively short piece, “First Dark” seemed the perfect embodiment of the conventions of southern literature that we had been chronicling. The story is centered on the unlikely courtship of Frances Harvey, the docile scion of one of Richten, Mississippi’s most established families, and Tom Beavers, a poor young man who has recently returned to the town. Over the course of the narrative the couple is haunted, both literally—by the ghost who is occasionally glimpsed at the edge of town—and figuratively—by the specter of the traditional southern hierarchy in which Richten is deeply invested. Certainly, “First Dark’s” characters are instantly recognizable even to the most novice student of southern literature: they comprise a sort of rogue’s gallery of gothic figures—the aging and ever-stoic belle; the dutiful, if tentative, daughter; the prescient but muted outsider; and the eerie but strangely earthly ghost. The story’s themes, too, are familiar to a reader of southern literature: like much of the work of Faulkner, Tate, or Warren, “First Dark” demonstrates a preoccupation with the power of place and the enduring importance of the past.