“The Bridegroom's Body” was originally published in the Summer 1938 issue of The Southern Review. It was collected in The Crazy Hunter: Three Short Novels (1940). It is currently most readily available in Three Short Novels (New Directions).

Kay Boyle's long short story (she called it a short novel, others a novella) “The Bridegroom's Body” has been reprinted often since its first appearance in the Southern Review. It was 1938, she was thirty-six and had published in that year a review of William Faulkner's The Unvanquished in The New Republic in which she wrote: “The weaknesses there are, the errors, the occasionally strained effects, are accomplished by the same fearless, gifted hand.” Those words could easily be turned back upon herself, but still, “The Bridegroom's Body” is a memorable and curious story as, sadly, some others of Boyle's are not.

I have said the story is curious. So it is, for it contained a strong feminist theme many years before such fiction became popular and by a writer who declared she had no feminist feelings whatever, indeed gave ample evidence that in her personal life she much preferred men to women. Curiouser still is that, although the intent and meaning of the story seems to me to be crystal clear and unambiguous, forty-three years after she had written it Kay Boyle firmly repudiated its unmistakable message.

Listen to the story, and then see what you think:

Lady Glourie, the protagonist and point of consciousness of the story, is “a woman of thirty five or six with a big pair of shoulders, strong as a wood yoke.” She smokes constantly, allowing her cigarette to hang from “her unpainted lip.” She is apparently the only woman (the swanherd's ailing wife is never seen and the farmer's wife and daughter are similarly absent from the visible action of the story) living on a vast, rural estate in southern England. She dresses always in tweed skirts, cardigans, suede jackets, and “the heavy brogues a man might have worn.” Her hair is “cut short as a man's hair on her ears and neck.” When she writes it is with “a bold strong man-like hand.”