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.