The Courtship is a collection of short stories with characters from the very young to the elderly who seem uncannily familiar to us in their pain, delight, and love. In "The Dress" a child's birthday party turns into a bizarre psychodrama. In "The Courtship" seventy-seven-year-old Mrs. Knickle romantically pursues eighty-year-old Mr. Van Buskirk with some hesitation, however, as she has come to enjoy her afternoons of peanut butter sandwiches and reading. And in Elliot's Daughter a writer, not only unrequited in love but unpublished, confesses his frustrations to his diary.