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“... On 13 December 1938, the young writer Jean Stafford, visiting Boston from her hometown, Boulder, Colorado, agreed to go for a ride in his father’s Packard with her 21-year-old suitor Robert Lowell. They had met the year before at a Colorado Writers’ Conference, and Lowell had been courting her intensely through the mails ...”

“... Capote – 22 years old, tiny, but potent. On the next page is a photograph (somewhat smaller) of Jean Stafford – 31 years old, severe, distant, possibly beautiful. On the very last page is a small shot of Gore Vidal, who at the preposterous age of 21 is the author of two novels. Vidal looks directly into the camera, sullen and contentious. John ...”

“... When​ Jean Stafford published Boston Adventure in 1944, at the age of 29, Life magazine called her ‘the most brilliant of new fiction writers’. The novel sold an impressive 380,000 copies and she went on to publish two more, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). Throughout the 1950s, her short stories were a fixture in the New Yorker ...”

“... criticism from women writers, especially when the subject is a woman. In a review of a book about Jean Stafford in 1988, Joyce Carol Oates declared her disgust with ‘pathography’, a narrative focused on dysfunction, breakdown, addiction and disaster, rather than on the mysterious process whereby artists spin their dirty straw into gold. Writing about ...”

“... caring and neglectful, destructive and helpless to fix the damage. He was married three times: to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1949 to 1972 and to Caroline Blackwood from 1972 to his death in 1977. With Hardwick he had a daughter, Harriet, and with Blackwood a son, Sheridan; he was also stepfather to Blackwood’s three ...”

“... One may exempt Robert Lowell’s Ballard-like moment in crashing a car and cruelly disfiguring Jean Stafford, but then one can only say ‘cruelly’ if the crash was intentional, which is no more than a believable speculation. I can imagine Edmund Wilson testifying that he was more afraid of being beaten by Mary McCarthy than she was of being beaten ...”

“... that could clip a hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford her ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the ...”

“... 1949, Lowell wrote a brief note to Elizabeth Bishop, a sympathetic message to his first wife, Jean Stafford, a weird word or two to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman, a sentence to George Santayana and two sentences to William Carlos Williams. Of these communications, those to Bishop, Buckman and Williams are certified as ‘written during an acute ...”

“... of some American women writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a ...”

“... good and lively in its place. It is a method Plimpton (along with his sometime collaborator Jean Stein) used much less beguilingly in a book about Robert Kennedy, but which they deployed to quite stunning effect in Edie, the story of Warhol starlet Edie Sedgewick. ‘The form is particularly appealing for a number of reasons,’ Plimpton writes, not ...”

“... his wing and excited him about literature, Shakespeare especially. When Lowell and his then wife, Jean Stafford, invited the Berrymans to their summer home in Maine in 1946, everyone got on famously, and a visit meant to last a weekend went on for two weeks. Berryman hadn’t enjoyed talking to another poet so much since his days at Harvard with ...”

“... their god Lono. The Tahitians’ own discovery during Bougainville’s visit is not forgotten: Jean Baret, botanical assistant, was Jeanne Baret. Nor the sad tale of La Pérouse, the French answer to Cook, who set sail with ships that were ‘almost floating laboratories’ and vanished after leaving the newly arrived British colonists at Botany Bay. ‘Is ...”

“... You must not let him in your apartment.’ He had twice broken the nose of his first wife, Jean Stafford, and injured her badly in a deliberate car crash. Hardwick wasn’t put off. ‘He’s an Adonis!’ she said to Elizabeth Bishop.They were married in July 1949. Hardwick insisted she didn’t know what she was getting into, ‘but even if I ...”

“... says, it can’t be otherwise with the book’s donnée. Lowell’s letters to his first wife, Jean Stafford, were destroyed by Stafford in a moment of rage; portions of some of his letters to Caroline Blackwood were transcribed by Ian Hamilton for his biography, but the letters themselves were stolen and have not ...”

“... his bottom, one stair at a time, when he went to see her). Lee was dependent on her cousin Bettina Stafford, who had come down from Scotland on a visit after Bevan died and, as Lee’s parents had done years before, stayed to look after her. Lee effectively adopted the Staffords’ son Vincent, who had stopped her ‘indulging my mood of total despair and ...”