Elizabeth Spencer is often compared to another Mississippi-born writer, Eudora Welty. Sometimes Spencer's name is even mentioned in the same critical breath with Henry James. The comparisons are flattering, but to be measured against some of the best usually means never measuring up. Cold comfort then for Spencer, especially since so many writers today are overpraised on a narrower scale of accomplishment.
The author's best-known work of fiction is the novel The Light in the Piazza (1960), in which an American mother takes her beautiful retarded daughter to Florence. There the girl is wooed and eventually wed by a local boy....
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