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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970. I am going to be reading stories from this collection all year.
Both “The Maiden” and “A Modest Proposal” were only about 10 pages (small print) long. I didn’t love either of them, but I did find them a bit intriguing. “The Maiden” involves a dinner party in post-WWII Germany where both the Germans and the Americans attending are a bit on edge. The Americans think they have the upper hand until a story about a lawyer, a guillotine, and a marriage proposal is told.
In “A Modest Proposal,” some women are in the Caribbean so they can either divorce their husbands or be divorced by them. Swift’s story of “A Modest Proposal” is involved in this story, and best I could tell, Stafford’s story was meant to be satirical as well, but I never was quite sure.
Both of these stories were well-written and interesting, but they almost deserve a higher critical study, and that’s something I am unable and unwilling to do at this time in my life. So, I will plug on with reading this, but I won’t promise too much intellectual commentary as I do.
