“The hash of that Paul Pry”

Emily Vanderpool, ten, needs a quiet place to read.

Jean Stafford, “A Reading Problem” (1956), in Collected Stories (1969).

This story is so reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s 1941 story “Why I Live at the P.O.” In each, an institution of sorts — a post office, a jail — becomes a home away from home for a young family-beset narrator. (Welty’s narrator, known only as Sister, has a sister named Stella-Rondo.) It turns out that Stafford and Welty corresponded, met occasionally in New York, and admired each other’s writing. Stafford, writing in 1975: “Just about every word Eudora Welty puts to paper delights me.”

Related reading
All OCA Jean Stafford posts (Pinboard)

[Paul Pry: “an excessively inquisitive person,” after the hero of Paul Pry (1825), a play by John Poole.” Stafford on Welty: from Charlotte Margolis Goodman’s Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990).]