The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation or friendship was itself reserved; “One loved her,” Mendelson said, “without there being a centre of herself that one loved. One loved her attributes—generosity, her sweetness, her learning, her sense that you were better than you were.” She also had “an absence of irrational hatreds and passions,” a commitment to “see in everyone the best they have.” She made a similar observation herself about her friend the poet James Merrill: “He had the generous talent of bringing out the best in his friends; one rose to his articulate occasion.” There was also a sense of serenity about her own place in the world, Mendelson felt: “She didn’t seem to care if you admired her work or not … She didn’t want anything from you. She wanted a sense of being part of your world of excellence … It was not that she felt ‘I am a famous person and I am being generous to you,’ she was absolutely at peace with herself.” That serenity embraced a notable reserve; despite her loquacity and her generosity, it was clear that there were things she chose not to disclose. The writer Matthew Specktor recalled her as “very very well defended” and described her use of conversation, admiringly—“she spoke in arias”—as a form of filibuster. Amanda Vaill, one of her editors at Viking, saw some of The Transit of Venus’s Caro Bell in her, a quality not exactly of reserve or aloofness but more of “being able to hold herself apart from a discussion … It was observant … She wasted nothing. She didn’t throw things away. She kept them.” And, Alec Wilkinson noted, she made judgments: “There was something so avid about her intellect; an intelligence that couldn’t help but take the measure of all it saw.”