2 representative Jean Stafford's stories and what they signify

Two stories in the "Western" section of Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) show the two aspects of her major themes (discussed in yesterday's post): First, The Liberation, in which a 30-year-old woman, stuck in a dead-end job teaching German in the local college in her small, provincial, impoverished town of Adams, Colorado, and oppressed by the constant demands and intrusions of her aunt and uncle, both hypochondriacs who expect their niece to attend to their every need and share their prejudicial beliefs and assumptions (that her family is the best in town, etc.), announces to them that she is leaving Colorado and moving to Boston where she will marry a Harvard prof., of whom they know nothing and whom, it seems, she hardly knows herself - is it love, or a final chance to escape an dreary and oppressive existence? Many if no most of the Stafford's stories involve this kind of escape or "liberation" and migration from a provincial life to the intellectual life of a city, in the East or Europe. The story takes a turn toward the melodramatic, but it's still a great illustration of the forces that drive Stafford's writing, many of which readers must assume are autobiographical. The next story in the collection, A Reading Problem, is one of the few in the first person and also one of the few w/ almost grotesque comic elements - in the vein of Welty or even O'Connor. This story picks up on the life of a character in an earlier piece, a young woman who craves solitude in which she can read and who has a sharp wit and an attraction to trouble-makers. This young woman, while sitting in a remote park trying to read a novel (and to memorize the books of the Bible so as to win a contest) attracts the attention of a guy who's an obvious con man and tries to sell her a copy of his self-published tract and then tries to get her to invite him and his daughter to dinner. The narrator here seems to be a younger version of the woman-who-would-escape, although at this point in her life she doesn't have that yearning - she doesn't yet know enough about the world. This story is in the vein of McCullers, w/ a precocious narrator who can fend well for herself, at least up to a point. Stafford's satire and critique of the trials of life in a small town feel quite different from the viewpoint of a young woman than they do from the viewpoint of an older woman who feels her life is slipping away. I don't know anything about Stafford's (3) novels, but I have a sense that these stories set forth themes and tableaux that she later incorporated - and maybe connected - in longer works.