Elizabeth Spencer (writer)

Elizabeth Spencer (July 19, 1921 – December 22, 2019) was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, "Fire in the Morning", was published in 1948. She wrote a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir ("Landscapes of the Heart", 1998), and a play ("For Lease or Sale", 1989). Her novella "The Light in the Piazza" (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She was a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Spencer's themes relate to tension between the individual and the group, and deal with how family or community ties support but also bind the individual's identity. She writes about this as it concerns the inner lives of her female characters, many of whom struggle to establish a fruitful life independent of society's narrow restrictions.
Early life and career.
Born in Carrollton, Mississippi, Spencer was valedictorian of her graduating class at J. Z. George High School. She earned her BA at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi and a master's in literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943.
Spencer taught at the junior college level at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi for two years, then accepted a job with the "Nashville Tennessean", but she soon returned to teaching, this time at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1953, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and left Mississippi to live in Italy and pursue writing full-time.
After her first three novels set in Mississippi, Spencer's career foundered for a while, for she was seen as a "Southern woman" writer, and not a literary figure. In 1981 she published her collected Stories, with a foreword by Eudora Welty, and her standing was reestablished among critics, who took another look at her contributions.
Personal life.
While in Italy, she met and married John Rusher of Cornwall, England. The couple moved to Montreal, Quebec in 1956, where they remained until moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1986. She taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until her retirement. Rusher died in 1998, and Spencer continued to live in her Chapel Hill home until her death on 22 December 2019.
Spencer's mother was the great-aunt of United States Senator John McCain.