The Catherine Wheel is a novel by Jean Stafford published in 1952 by Harcourt & Brace.Wilson, 1996 p. 162: Selected Bibliography

Contents I On the First Day of Summer II My True Love Took from Me III The Sea's Souvenirs IV The Late Wedding Ring V The Dream of a Dove VI The Child in the House VII The Leaves of the Fig Trees VIII On the Final Night of Summer

Plot

Reception Writing in The Kenyon Review, novelist and literary critic Irving Howe registered dissatisfaction with The Catherine Wheel.Howe, 1952 p. 347: "...disappointment with her new book...[T]he story itself is not very promising...not, in its larger outlines, a very original or intriguing situation." Howe's complaint centers on Stafford's bravura performance as a literary stylist, but which her "dazzling" prose tends to overwhelm the narrative elements.Howe, 1952 p. 348

Retrospective appraisal

Reviewer Scott Bradfield in the Los Angeles Times praises The Catherine Wheel as "the last of her excellent novels," and "reminiscent of Henry James."Bradfield, 2019: "The Catherine Wheel envisions adolescence as a form of slow torture twisting unusual children into ugly adult shapes and slows the narrative pace to a subjective drone of thoughts, experiences, memories, observations and reflections. It's reminiscent of late Henry James..." And: ...the last of her excellent novels..."

Biographer Mary Ann Wilson considers The Catherine Wheel Stafford's "most complex novel" of her three novels.Wilson, 1996 p. 68: Stafford's "last and most complex novel..."

Theme

The title of the novel had a number of associations for Stafford, primarily a reference to the Christian martyr and saint Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine,[a] Catherine is said to have died during the early 4th century by order of the Roman emperor Maxentius.

The torture device used in Saint Catherine's public execution was the breaking wheel, also known as the Catherine or Katherine Wheel. According to critic Blanche H. Gelfant, Stafford's protagonist, Katherine, suffers a gruesome death similar to that of the saint:

Critic Irving Howe considers Stafford's resort to "a spectacular death [is] convenient as a way of evading Katharine's difficulty but disturbing as the climax to 250 pages of static introspection."Howe, 1952 p. 347: See here for quoted material. And: p. 348: "Miss Stafford's proclivity for violent endings seems to rest too much on a belief in convenient carelessness in her three novels, respectively, carelessness with contraceptives, rifles, and fireworks." Biographer David Roberts shares an anecdote from Stafford that corresponds with the title of the novel, occurring five years after its publication:

Footnotes

Sources Bradfield, Scott. 2019. "The new collection roams as many extremes as Jean Stafford's Golden State." Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2019-11-27/jean-stafford-complete-novels-boston-adventure-the-mountain-lion-the-catherine-wheel Accessed 16 February, 2026. Gelfant, Blanche H. 1979. "Revolutionary Turnings: 'The Mountain Lion.'" The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1979, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 117-125. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25088931 Accessed 24 February, 2026. Howe, Irving. 1952. "Sensibility Troubles." The Kenyon Review, Spring, 1952, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Dante Number (Spring, 1952), pp. 345-348 Kenyon College. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4333333 Accessed 23 February, 2026. Roberts, David. 1988. "Jean & Joe: The Stafford-Liebling Marriage." The American Scholar, Summer 1988, Vol. 57, No. 3, pp. 373-391 The Phi Beta Kappa Society https://www.jstor.org/stable/41211547 Accessed 23 February, 2026. Wilson, Mary Ann. 1996. Jean Stafford: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers. Simon & Schuster, New York.