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The mismatches, not-quite-conflicts, both slight and substantial, over the coming months were perhaps inevitable in the face of their very different backgrounds. The age gap of twenty-five years was heightened by the disparity in their professional standing: Shirley’s writing life was just beginnin…

The stories she was writing through 1961 and 1962 reflected these complications and sufferings. The young woman in “The Party” endures an evening of her lover’s cold and dismissive manner. As she is leaving his apartment, he comments on her “mournful face. Not tragic, of course—just mournful.” She …

Her second was “Vittorio,” the writing of which had preoccupied her through 1960; she found it difficult to write from the perspective of an older man surprised by love. The upturning of Vittorio’s life comes about when he invites an English couple into his family home—in a town resembling Siena—as…

Shirley was furious, but the disappointment had been overshadowed even before it happened by a letter from The New Yorker, this time an acceptance. It is not clear whether she had revised those first rejected stories or if this was new work. Either way, she now knew someone on the inside, which cha…

Perhaps her claims to penury were exaggerated; there was, after all, enough money to travel to Italy for the next several summers, as well as time to spend there, thanks to the UN’s generous allowance of six weeks annual leave: “I went to Italy on the charter flight and came back with $10 which I a…