A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall.

Her first novel Boston Adventure was a best-seller earning her national acclaim. Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death: David Roberts' Jean Stafford a Biography (1988) Charlotte Margolis Goodman's Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990) and Ann Hulbert's The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford (1992). Among these Goodman's deals most successfully with Stafford as a proto-feminist writer.