Welcome to Pass Christian Books -
Your Bookstore at the Harbor in Pass Christian!

Pass Christian, MS 39571
Telephone: (228) 452-7399
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Fire In The Morning (1948)
This Crooked Way (1952)
The Voice At The Back Door (1956)
The Light In The Piazza (1960)
Knights and Dragons (1965)
No Place For An Angel (1967)
Ship Island and Other Stories (1968)
The Snare (1972)
The Stories Of Elizabeth Spencer (1981)
Marilee (1981)
The Salt Line (1984)
Jack of Diamonds And Other Stories (1988)
On the Gulf (1991)
The Night Travelers (1991)
Landscapes Of The Heart (Memoir/1998)
The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction (2001)

Elizabeth Spencer was born in 1921 in Carrollton, Mississippi. Both of her parents were descended from several generations of Carroll County farmers and merchants. Spencer's Mississippi lineage was deep and rich, and her upbringing was in the genteel Southern tradition befitting a young lady from an established and comfortable family.

But unlike many Mississippi writers, Spencer did not stay put. After an education at Belhaven, where she established a lifelong friendship with Eudora Welty, and a graduate degree from Vanderbilt, she moved to Italy. While there, she met her husband, an Englishman, and moved to Montreal. In 1986, Spencer and her husband returned to the South, settling in North Carolina.

Spencer's third novel, "The Voice At The Back Door," possibly her best to date, created a controversy when published in 1956. The story involves small town Mississippi politics, an election for sheriff, and a black man accused of murdering a white man. The story is set in mid-twentieth century Lacey, Mississippi at a time, both in the story and in reality, when race relations were tense, boundaries and traditional roles were in flux, and vigilante justice was still an unspoken midnight option.

Spencer wrote "The Voice At The Back Door" while living in Italy. In an interview Spencer observed, "That distancing helped me to sharpen the southern dialect in the book. You can't really know what it is to be southern unless you know what it is not to be southern."

The Mississippi Gulf Coast is a favorite place for Spencer. In her memoir, "Landscapes Of The Heart" she writes, "If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be . . .I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back as it was before Hurricane Camille, that wretched killer which struck in August 1969."

The Coast is memorialized in one of Spencer's finest short stories, "Ship Island", winner of one of the five O. Henry Prizes she has been awarded over the years. Nancy, a young lady twenty or so in years, has recently moved with her parents to a rental home on the Coast.

There is a mythical touch to the story as Nancy seeks a comfortable identity. She is uncomfortable with her parents, and uneasy around her boyfriend and his friends. On an excursion to Ship Island, "she had drifted in the water like seaweed, with the tide combing her limbs and hair, tugging her through lengths of fuzzy water growth." In this scene and another on the mainland beach in a rainstorm, the ocean serves as a liminal space, a physical experience that transforms her inwardly and emboldens her will to express her uniqueness. Nancy's moods and thoughts swell with the tides. She becomes as elusive and mysterious as the ocean's mermaid. In the water, Nancy is unconstrained; on land, she is marginalized and inferior.

Eudora Welty writes about Spencer, "She can faultlessly set the social scene; she takes delight in making the characters reveal themselves through the most precise and telling particulars." Though I first read "Ship Island" several years ago, Nancy still rattles around in my thoughts, restless, immeasurable in some ways as real people often are, and I wonder how she turned out as an adult. Only a true to life, breathing character can live in a reader's mind long after the story has been read.

Perhaps for all of Spencer's many literary awards and honors the most telling remains this - the discerning, critical, and difficult-to-please Faulkner kept Spencer's first novel, "Fire In The Morning" on his personal bookshelf at Rowan Oak, his Oxford home, where the book still rests today. Nothing more need be said about Spencer's permanence in Southern and American literature.