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. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, restores to print the author's most masterful stories and novellas including The Light in the Piazza--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.