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Plath’s poetry, Stafford transcribed her mother’s letters to her with jeering annotations, to be sent to her friends for their amusement.
    â€œNothing can more totally subdue the passions than familial piety” it’s observed with a shudder in the Colorado-set story “The Liberation.” Here, a desperate young woman barely manages to escape from her smothering older relatives, who want to appropriate, like genteel vampires, her imminent marriage. On the train headed east, Polly Bay thinks, “How lonely I have been. And then, ‘I am not lonely now.’” Stafford seems to have both despised and feared her father, by her account an obsessive, brutal, bigoted man from whom escape was imperative; in the preface to the Collected Stories she speaks glibly of him as the author of a western novel called When Cattle Kingdom Fell , which she never troubled to read. (Nor did Stafford read A Stepdaughter of the Prairie , a memoir of aKansas girlhood by a cousin.) Yet, ironically, as John Stafford toiled for thirty years on a crank analysis of government deficit spending, so Stafford herself would toil for more than twenty years on a novel unfinished at the time of her death, titled “The Parliament of Women.” Ironically also, though perhaps unsurprisingly, Stafford was drawn to the volatile, domineering, manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell who wreaked havoc in her life even before she married him, remarking in a letter to a friend that, though Stafford sometimes hated Lowell, “he does what I have always needed to have done to me and that is that he dominates me.” (This domination included even such physical abuse as attempted strangulation.)
    One of Stafford’s most famous stories is “The Interior Castle,” an eerie, hallucinatory account of the ordeal of a young woman named Pansy Vannerman who has suffered a terrible injury to her face and head following a traffic accident in a taxi; like Stafford, who was disfigured in an accident caused by Robert Lowell’s drunken driving, Pansy must undergo facial surgery that involves extreme pain:
    [The surgeon] had now to penetrate regions that were not anesthetized and this he told her frankly…The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dextrously, one by one; the pain writhed spirally…. The pain was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak.
    In this ecstasy of pain, Stafford’s normally restrained prose soars to astonishing heights as if the subject were not pain but an unspeakable violation of the self: “[Pansy’s] brain trembled for its life, hearing the knives hunting like wolves…” It’s significant that in Stafford’s story, the driver of the crashed car has died, while in life, Robert Lowell survived relatively uninjured, and prevailed upon Stafford to marry him against her better judgment. Their eight-year marriage, far more tempestuous than that of May and Daniel in “A Country Love Story,” would end in a painful divorce in 1948 from which Stafford seems never to have fully recovered: she would marry and divorce again, twice; during the final twenty years of her life she would make herself and everyone who knew her miserable with her alcoholism, ill health, and highly vocal misanthropy.
    Narrated in the cool, detached tone of a fairy tale, “A Country Love Story” evokes the experience of living with a brilliant man who has become mentally ill. Daniel isn’t a celebrated confessional poet but rather a professor given to “private musings” and obsessive work on a research project “of which he never spoke except to say that it would bore [his wife, May.]” To insulate herself from Daniel’s unpredictable mood