Users’ Guide: A Word from the Editor

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy,” is Doc’s advice in “The Wide Net,” and we know now that in looking back at her first story, Eudora Welty recognized that the journey itself had always been her “approach”: “The journey of errand or search (for some form of the secret of life) ... was to underlie many stories” (218; “Looking Back” 301). With this in mind, I invite readers to explore this issue of the Eudora Welty Review.

We begin with the voice of Welty as she reminisces about Walker Percy with Patrick Samway, S. J., whose affiliations with Welty are part of a wide net. Samway is the author of Walker Percy: A Life, the research for which occasioned this conversation with Welty. Samway is also well known in Faulkner studies, and through his two Fulbright sojourns in France, he worked with Michel Gresset, translator of both Faulkner and Welty. Robert Giroux was Percy’s editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Welty’s editor at Harcourt Brace for The Golden Apples, The Ponder Heart, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, and Short Stories. Samway has just concluded the editing of The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton. We look forward to learning about the Giroux/Welty relationship in a future EWR issue.

Susan Wood’s exploratory essay asks readers to consider The Robber Bridegroom through the lens of the fascism of the time of Welty’s composition. Rebecca Harrison considers the Natchez Trace stories of The Wide Net from the perspectives of romantic nationalism, colonial conquest, and manifest destinies by drawing on her research in women’s captivity narratives. Alison Graham-Bertolini gives us a view of Eugene MacLain in “Music from Spain” that we might have noticed earlier had we not been so enthralled by Rebecca Mark’s watershed reading in The Dragon’s Blood. Readers may readily engage with these authors’ assertions and reflections, and we are pleased to connect with these new scholars in the field of Welty studies.

Carolyn Brown’s and Jessica Temple’s essays consider Welty in relation with other literary artists. Welty’s reading and appreciation of Jane Austen is documented in the essay eventually published as “The Radiance of Jane Austen” in The Eye of the Story. In a 1972 interview for The Paris Review, Linda Kuehl asked, “You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerate Jane Austen’s kind of family novel. Is Austen a kindred spirit?” Welty somewhat tartly responded, “Tolerate? I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don’t read her or anyone else for ‘kindredness’” (“Art” 74). Brown’s essay illuminates a different sort of kindredness: Welty noting comparisons of her novel Delta Wedding with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for her niece Mary Alice. Poet Temple, who completed her doctorate in May 2015, had just studied the writing and life of Elizabeth Bishop when she took up the challenge of researching the background of a brief correspondence between Bishop and Welty hinging on Phoenix Jackson and “A Worn Path.”

Welty studies are vibrant with new scholars entering the field, robust conference presentations, books in press, research keeping the Mississippi Department of Archives and History buzzing, and the Welty Biennial in Jackson beautifully conceived and managed by David Kaplan (weltybien-nial.org), and we note this activity with reviews of books by Sarah Ford, Rebecca Mark, Pearl Amelia McHaney, and Sally Wolff. We include Mark’s Ersatz America, although not a Welty study, to recognize Mark as a Welty scholar whose opinions matter to readers of EWR. Look also to the concluding entry of Practical Matters to find Jacob Agner’s report on his work in the archives last summer as a Eudora Welty Research Fellow. Agner, Elizabeth Crews, and Ebony Lumumba, three of the past five research fellows, presented their archival and ongoing research at the Welty Biennial Scholars Symposium on June 5, 2015, assuring that the future of Welty studies is in good hands and strong...