Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

28 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney, Georgia State University
  • Book: Eudora Welty
  • Published online: 22 September 2009
  • Print publication: 31 March 2005, pp vii-xvi
  • View extract

    Summary

    From the start of her career, Eudora Welty was praised and plagued by the dichotomies of being from the South but having a universal point of view, of being a woman yet writing short fiction comparable with the best of her day, of keeping her own literary circles without being unduly swayed by publishers or fashion. Nearly always, her work was admired for the individual, dense, rich style, yet, nearly as often, it was criticized for lack of plot and for complex, abstruse description.

    Remarkably, the reviews of Welty's A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) identified the strengths and weaknesses of this first collection and of the writing that was to follow, stereotyped her writing for good and for bad, and found kinship with great writers and painters, American and foreign. Rose Feld, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, linked Welty's writing with that of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Kay Boyle, and Katherine Anne Porter, calling the short stories by these writers a “peculiarly feminine genre” with a “quality of mood which surrounds and gives meaning to the incident.” For the next forty years, reviewers congratulated Welty on the mood she created in her fiction while counseling her to build more plot. Louise Bogan praised A Curtain of Green for Gothic elements as fine as Poe's and for the details that recalled the writings of Gogol before concluding that Welty's success was limited to the Southern region.

Page 1 of 2