Spencer, Elizabeth (1921– )

US writer of novels and short stories. Her early novels are based in the rural South, and several others are set in Italy, where she lived 1953–58, as in The Light in the Piazza (1960), but whatever the setting, her works tend to deal with expatriates and outsiders.

She was born in Carrollton, Mississippi. She studied at Belhaven College (BA 1942) and Vanderbilt (MA 1943). She married in 1956. She taught writing at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada 1976–86 and at the University of North Carolina from 1986.