‘Light in the Piazza’ author wrote of South
Elizabeth Spencer, a grande dame of Southern literature who bravely navigated between the Jim Crow past and the open-ended present in her novels and stories, including the celebrated novella “The Light in the Piazza,” has died at 98.
Spencer, who sometimes went by her married name, Elizabeth Rusher, died Sunday night in Chapel Hill, N.C., according to playwright Craig Lucas, who adapted “The Light in the Piazza” for the stage.
Old enough to know exslaves and Civil War veterans, Spencer chronicled her complicated affection for her ties to tiny Carrollton, Miss. — her determination to honor them and to leave them behind.
“In a small town that’s been there for ages, some people look out and some look in,” she wrote. “As for myself, I mainly just looked around me.”
“The Light in the Piazza” is the story of a North Carolina woman in Florence who worries as her mentally impaired daughter falls in love with an Italian. It was a critical favorite adapted into a 1962 movie that starred Olivia de Havilland and Yvette Mimieux and into a Broadway musical that in 2006 won six Tonys.
“She’s not only an inspiring person on the page, but an amazing friend,” said North Carolina-based novelist Allan Gurganus, whose friendship with Spencer began in 1972 when she wrote to congratulate him on a short story he published. He described her as someone who believed in younger writers and encouraged them to achieve their promise.
Admired by Eudora Welty and Alice Munro, among others, Spencer wrote the novels “The Snare” and “The Salt Line” and dozens of short stories. She completed a play, “For Lease or Sale,” and the memoir “Landscapes of the Heart.” Her honors included the Rea Award and PEN/ Malamud prize for lifetime achievement in short fiction, five O’Henry prizes for short stories and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Spencer was a final link to the pre-World War II South and to an era when Welty and other writers from that region struggled for national recognition. Born in 1921, Spencer was descended from plantation owners and grew up in a community where girls were chastised for smoking, gossip was forbidden (but flourished anyway) and matrons lived in columned mansions.
She was an undergraduate at Belhaven College (now Belhaven University) in Jackson, Miss., and received a master’s in literature from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Regrets, troubled marriages and long-lost relatives were common themes of Spencer’s writing. She confronted her generation’s anxiety over civil rights. In the novella “The Business Venture,” a circle of Mississippi friends is unable even to mention the savage beatings of Freedom Riders or the whites enraged over efforts to integrate the University of Mississippi.
“They [blacks] were all around us, had always been, living around us, waiting on us, sharing our lives, brought up with us, nursing us, cooking for us, mourning and rejoicing with us, making us laugh, stealing from us, digging our graves,” she wrote. “But when all the troubles started coming in on us after the Freedom Riders and the Ole Miss riots, we decided not to talk about it.”
Spencer was married for 42 years to John Rusher, who died in 1998. She taught most recently at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, allowing her to remain out of Carrollton, but not out of the South.