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 always reserved. I came back usually on the Friday so that I’d have the weekend to recover from the flight before beginning work and getting my pent-up salary and I got a salary advance to go away too. And I would come back with this $10.” When she finally gathered the courage to leave the UN, she felt that it was a liberation: “I’d been trying to cope with this completely disillusioning bureaucratic life and pretending that it mattered in a way I didn’t believe.” Ever after she would say that “the real risk was to stay.” Her capacity to imagine a departure from, an alternative to, working at the UN had been formed by her experiences in this past year, in Italy, in the values and the joy she had learnt in Naples and in the north. Solaia embodied principles she had tried to accommodate in her life: “It is difficult to convey without solemnity the homage paid in that house to civilised greatness; and the presence, whether invoked or latent, of art and poetry.” The Vivantes made tangible to her not only these values but also something of her own worth: “It was there, and through them, that I was released into a larger life; restored to the measure of belief in myself that the United Nations had eroded.” She would look back to this time and its significance within the story of her life: “My idyllic ‘childhood,’ ‘lost domaine,’ or what takes its place was Solaia. Moments of realised perfection, dreamlike suspension of time and ‘complicity’ of Nature. Perhaps not comparable, because heightened by consciousness; as childhood might instead be boundless with innocence.” She was able, finally now, to inhabit the childhood she had always imagined for herself, to join, imaginatively at least, a family with elevated principles and sensibilities, to be recognised and welcomed by them, and to return from them to the larger world.

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 changed everything. The previous month, just as he had done the year before with Arturo Vivante, Dwight Macdonald had offered to take one of her stories to the magazine, which meant that it would circumvent the slush pile and go straight to William Maxwell. Maxwell was legendary, by many accounts the most significant editor of short fiction in the United States through the postwar decades; he had worked with J. D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, and Eudora Welty. In a memoir of his friendship with Maxwell, Alec Wilkinson wrote that Maxwell brought to the work of editing “a selfless interest in encouraging talent, and an intimacy with the catalog of technical possibility” and that he simply took pleasure in good writing. The writers Maxwell worked with were “on the whole so accomplished that his position also involved taking delight in what they brought into being.” He was “extremely receptive to women writers,” and his relationship with Shirley in the years that followed was “golden,” a “meeting of minds.” With a devotion—what Wilkinson described as “a near spiritual hunger”—for literature that echoed her own, William Maxwell was surely Shirley’s ideal first reader.

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 paying guests and unexpectedly falls in love with the young wife. The story turns on Vittorio’s realisation that the young woman, too, has fallen in love—with him.

It was with astonishment, more than anything else, that he saw her eyes enlarge with tears before she turned from him toward the house—an unbearable astonishment that called upon all his capacities for comprehension. He followed her in silence. They entered the house together and began to climb the stairs. He was profoundly aware of her, moving slowly and sadly at his side, but it did not occur to him to speak. He felt that he must be alone to think about it, that there must be some rational, disappointing explanation.

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 responds, tearfully, “You should be trying to build up my confidence … instead of doing everything to demolish it.” And he: “‘Confidence is one of those things we try to instill into others and then hasten to dispel as soon as it puts in an appearance.’ ‘Like love,’ she observed, turning to the door. ‘Like love,’ he said. “Exactly.’” She wrote even more directly from life in the twinned stories “A Place in the Country” and “The Picnic,” which tell of a young woman’s affair with her cousin’s husband, the discovery of the affair, and its consequences. These fictional characters are starkly different from the protagonists in Shirley’s real-life drama with Tex and Wicky Goldschmidt. Nonetheless, parts of “A Place in the Country” retrace events described in her diaries. And the story’s climax, the scene where Clem tells Nettie that they must part, is drawn almost verbatim:

“I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I only said that once, didn’t I?”
“Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.
“Several times, then,” he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case—I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”

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 beginning—her first stories had only recently been published—whereas Francis had fourteen books, with another due later that year. And though neither had come from an especially privileged background, Francis had certainly had the kind of formal education that allowed him to move seamlessly into the elevated cultural circles that had opened up to him through his first marriage, while Shirley’s early life had been sorely lacking in such qualities and opportunities, and she had acquired whatever she had much more recently and solely through her own efforts. And yet they were both struck by the connection that sparked between them that first evening; their shared tastes—with Taste itself, honed through assiduous application, so essential to both—and interests, energies, and capacities. They would be married at the end of the year; the complications between them were also perhaps the basis of what would go on to become the only mature and sustained love affair in Shirley’s life. It was, in a sense, what she had always dreamed of.