Short story
The Interior Castle
Jean Stafford · 1946
Synopsis
Pansy Vanneman, twenty-five, was a passenger in a taxi that crashed, and the driver died. With a fractured skull and a crushed nose, she has been waiting in hospital for six weeks for the operation on her nose, which the young Dr Nicholas is eager to perform. She keeps apart from the nurses and imagines her brain as a jewel that she guards in secret. She is operated on under local anaesthetic, and she follows the instruments one by one: forceps, probes, head mirror.
Context
Published in Partisan Review at the end of 1946, the story transposes the accident of 1938 and the operations on her face that followed; it is the only time the author made it into fiction. The title comes from Teresa of Ávila, for whom the soul is a castle with seven mansions. Selected for the annual anthology of the best American short stories, it entered in 1953 the collection Children Are Bored on Sunday, then in 1969 the collected volume that earned Stafford the Pulitzer Prize.
Who it is for
A short story of fourteen pages, staying close to the sensations of a woman who has undergone an operation. Translated into French in 2019 under the title Le Château intérieur.
Prizes and reception
Chosen by John Updike in 1999 among the best American short stories of the century; perhaps the best known of her stories.
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