Mark Ford writes:

It is fortunate that so many of the post-engagement epistles survive, for increasingly Stevens began to confide to Elsie the perceptions he had previously kept to his journal. At the heart of The Contemplated Spouse are the 112 letters composed by Wallace to Elsie in the nine months between their betrothal at the end of 1908, which caused a serious and never-healed rift with his parents, and their finally becoming Mr and Mrs Stevens on 21 September the following year. Some of these have previously appeared in Holly Stevens’s edition of his Letters (1966), but many are published here for the first time. Stevens was a man made out of words, to adapt one of his greatest poem’s titles. ‘Are you really fond of books,’ he asks Elsie; ‘paper valleys and far countries, paper gardens, paper men and paper women? They are all I have, except you; and I live with them constantly.’

(LRB 24 May 2007)

South Carolina | hardback 430 pp. |ISBN: 9781570032486