Unlike most of Jack Hodgins's early stories, “The Concert Stages of Europe,” which opens his second collection of short stories, The Barclay Family Theatre (1981), employs a first-person narrator and seemingly fictionalizes episodes from the author's own life. In this respect it differs from the narrative mode preferred by Hodgins. Gaining critical recognition in 1976 with his first collection, Spit Delaney's Island, he had originally written about characters very different from himself and avoided the autobiographical impulse that inspired many stories by major Canadian writers like Alice Munro and Clark Blaise. Apart from the story “Earthquake” (later included in an adapted form in The Macken Charm, 1995, the first volume of Hodgins's trilogy, followed by Broken Ground, 1998, and Distance, 2003), which drew on the memories and experiences of Hodgins's parental generation and his extended family, only the two framing stories of The Barclay Family Theatre use first-person narration and focus on the activities of the author's alter ego, Barclay Philip Desmond. Here and elsewhere, the feats of his kin, such as the histrionic and humorous talents and adventures of the narrator's six maternal aunts, provide the touch of situational comedy that is the hallmark of Hodgins's art in his stories and early novels. He characteristically evokes a vivid and often humorous picture of life in the hitherto literally unmapped region of northern Vancouver Island, a territory populated by loggers, veterans, settlers on stump farms, and workers in pulp mills.

In an early interview, the author stated that he had overcome a sense of marginalization and insignificance by choosing to depict the sometimes freakish characters inhabiting his “own little postage stamp of native soil … worth writing about” (Faulkner in Cowley 1959, 141). William Faulkner's famous phrase seems to be particularly apt in an analysis of Hodgins's fiction; the latter admitted to an intense admiration for the American writer, one that had initially prevented him from finding his own voice. The precision of his depiction of landscape and of social structures in his early stories quickly earned him the label “realist” and “regionalist” (Pritchard 1984; 1985). But it was through American masters of fiction such as Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor (see Zacharasiewicz 1986) that Hodgins learned to invoke the universal aspects of a seemingly restricted, rural existence, remote from the centers of culture.