Themes that run throgh Jean Stafford's stories

So many of the pieces in Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) concern escape, specifically, a young woman's escape from a stifling, small, rural community - usually on the plains of Colorado (sometimes the town is called Adams, interesting foreshadowing - and making her way to a new environment in the East - generally in NY (e.g., Sundays the Children Are Bored) or New England - where she feels, at least initially, culturally inferior and out of place (e.g., The Bleeding Heart). There are variants on this theme, in particular in the "Innocents Abroad" stories (e.g., Maggie Merriwether's Rich Experience) in which an American woman of privileged background feels similarly out of place and inferior on a visit to England or Europe. A few of the stories more explicitly examine the small-town, rural life, but always w/ an attention to social class: Even in the remote, impoverished town on the plains there is a social strata, with the top rung commandeered by Easterners who come to Colorado for vacation, either their own pastoral retreat, (the Mountain Day) for the very wealthiest, or a time on a dude ranch for others (Healthiest Girl in Town); in either case, there is generally a young woman whose family needs obligate her to work at the ranch or to cater in some manner - nursing, sometimes, or living in a boarding house where she is unloved and unwanted (In the Zoo, the Liberation). I know little about Stafford's life but suspect that she lived through a similar metamorphosis or migration - leading from an impoverished and emotionally scarred childhood to the literary scene in NY, among which she never felt quite at home as those, like her troubled husband, to the manner born.