You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.

Her first novel Boston Adventure was a best-seller earning her national acclaim. Several biographies of Jean Stafford were written following her death: David Roberts' Jean Stafford a Biography (1988) Charlotte Margolis Goodman's Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990) and Ann Hulbert's The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford (1992). Among these Goodman's deals most successfully with Stafford as a proto-feminist writer.