I wish she’d been a dog

Elaine Showalter

• Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart by Charlotte Margolis Goodman
  University of Texas Press, 394 pp, $24.95, May 1990, ISBN 0 292 74022 0
• Jean Stafford: A Biography by David Roberts
  Chatto, 494 pp, £16.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 7011 3010 5

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. When she refused to marry him, however, Lowell went into a rage and crashed the car into an embankment. He was unhurt (the court later charged him with driving while intoxicated), but Stafford sustained massive injuries to her skull, nose and jaw that required five painful operations to repair. After the accident, she would always look battered, her eyes teary and ‘permanently welled-up’. As Lowell’s friend Blair Clark remarked, ‘there was about a 25 per cent reduction of the aesthetic value in her face.’