Ruth Steiner, a prickly short story writer, is courted by the literary community as the voice of her age. The balance of that life is disrupted when Ruth takes on Lisa, her gifted and ungainly student in a creative writing class at Columbia University, as her assistant. Lisa brings an overwhelming devotion, curiosity and willingness to learn to the job. Professor Steiner encourages her to write for publication, and Lisa evolves from an insecure young girl to a confident published writer under Ruth's tutelage. During the six years over which the play occurs, Lisa elicits the total confidence of her mentor and even gets the older woman to venture into what had always been forbidden ground for Ruth: the story of her sad love affair as a young woman with the self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz. 

                    The conflict stems from these stories that were told to her by Ruth as their  relationship develops. Were they appropriated or did they now belong to the recipient to develop into new stories? Inspired by the famous controversy between novelist  David Leavitt and poet Stephen Spender (Spender claimed that Leavitt's When England Sleeps had been lifted from his memoir, World Within Worlds).   COLLECTED STORIES examines this relationship between a brilliant writer and her younger female student. As always, Margulies is literate, intellectually stimulating, and able to create characters of both dramatic and human interest.  Here two worlds clash in age-old, ecumenical dueling, led up to by great  mutual emotional investment, and all the more bitter for it.