It’s not that interesting to say that Jean Stafford is underread, even if it’s true. Maybe this is because so many of our artists who happen to be women are talked about thus: as vitamins we ought to swallow. Sure, Stafford was overshadowed by her first husband, the poet Robert Lowell; undoubtedly, lifelong struggles with her health (particularly alcoholism, a subject for her heartbreaking story “Children Are Bored on Sunday”) were detrimental to her productivity. But her later novels—1947’s The Mountain Lion and 1952’s The Catherine Wheel—have their fans, and a writer whose Collected Stories won the Pulitzer Prize can’t persuasively be called overlooked.

If Stafford’s debut is said to be underread, this might have something to do with the author’s stated intentions: the book’s Proustian heft and preoccupation with psychology, its Jamesian interest in the Boston Brahmin. The whole enterprise is stubbornly old-fashioned, but that’s the very thing I love about it.

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Sonie Marburg, the novel’s heroine and narrator, lives a mean little life—“we were very poor” are the first words she offers us. Her mother, Shura, Russian by birth, has been disappointed by everything. “How great had been her hopes the day she left Moscow! Her fellow waitresses, clinging to her, sobbing with envy, had sworn that she would be rich.” Instead her marriage to a German shoemaker, and their emigration to the United States, finds her . . . disappointed. “Ah, Hermann Marburg, I hate you from the bottom of my soul!”

From a room inside the hotel where her mother works as a chambermaid, Sonie can sometimes glimpse salvation: “I could see Boston and its State House dome, gleaming like a golden blister.” She has a particular attachment to a regular at the hotel, Miss Lucy Pride (the young Stafford is not especially subtle with character names), who is everything her parents are not: sophisticated, measured, and if not kind at least aware of Sonie’s existence.

To be small is to be stuck. Boston (and adulthood, and liberty) looms—the book’s working title was The Outskirts—but might as well be the moon. The first section of the book isn’t named for the dreary fictional village of Chichester, where it is set, but for the Hotel Barstow itself. That’s where Sonie truly prepares for life, playing understudy to her mother, too ill to work. The Barstow is a seasonal operation; it’s as though Sonie isn’t even a person most of the year.

I’m usually bored by children in fiction that is written for adults. I think writers forget, over time, how we thought when we were young and struggle to fix in words the illogic of childhood. Novels for adults reach for either the sentimental or the surreal, quite in contrast to how the best writers for children—Louise Fitzhugh, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume—reflect back to their readers something essential about the reality in which they find themselves.