“Both authors are aunts!”: The Note That Compares Delta Wedding with Pride and Prejudice

During the spring of 1965, Mary Alice Welty, Eudora Welty’s niece, was a senior at Murrah High School in Jackson, Mississippi. She was assigned a paper for English, requiring her to compare a British novel with an American one. She recalls her teacher strongly suggesting she use one of the novels written by her “famous aunt” for the assignment, and the result was a comparison of Welty’s Delta Wedding with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Interview). After completing a draft of the paper, she turned to her “Aunt Dodo” for help, and Welty provided it in a typewritten letter, laying out the similarities and differences between the two novels. This letter, only recently shared publicly, is the strongest evidence yet of a connection between Delta Wedding and Pride and Prejudice and a testament to Welty’s affection for Austen as a novelist.¹

Eudora Welty’s note to her niece, Mary Alice Welty, spring 1965. Welty placed the typewritten note in an Algonquin Hotel envelope and wrote on the front: “Mary Alice—a few notes if they’re any use to you—Sorry to miss you— Dodo.” Photograph by Roderick Red.

Permission granted by Mary Alice Welty White.

Welty’s fondness for the novels of Jane Austen has already been well documented in correspondence to her friend and editor William Maxwell and in her essay “The Radiance of Jane Austen.”² The letter to Mary Alice Welty predates these references to Austen, which appeared in 1966 and 1969 respectively, and is remarkable in that it clearly delineates in shorthand form the similarities and differences between the two novels:

Likenesses:

Both novels are set in self-contained small worlds. Both limit themselves in scope to the domestic scene. In both the family is the story, with its relationships and situations, and the matrimonial plot. Both are feminine in style and approach and in their narrative point of view. Neither (I hope) is sentimental. Instead, both are (I hope) observant and written with an eye and ear as sharp as possible. In Miss Austen’s case, neither eye nor ear could has often been surpassed. Both are comic novels.

Differences:

There are two centuries and a half and the Atlantic ocean between the two writers, to begin with. Yet we have learned for ourselves that Jane Austen’s work cannot date for any reason of change in times or tastes or fashions. The comedy and the irony and the wit, the character drawing, the delightful invention of plot and incident, the sparkling vitality, the sure and minute knowledge of her soceity [sic] and her conveyance of it so as to make a whole world shine brightly in a few acres of English landscape—through all this, Jane Austen will never stop being read and loved as a novelist. She is one of the very great English novelists of all time. And so more than in the case of the centuries apart and the countries apart, there is the question of her genius which separates her from any American lady novelist now alive (I think) (and most people surely think).

One other similarity: both authors are aunts!

This personal note connects the two novels in very concrete terms: setting, plot, point of view and tone, as well as connecting the two “lady novelist[s]” on a personal level—aunts, a role that Welty took very much to heart, as her two nieces, Mary Alice and older sister Elizabeth, had lost their father so young.³

The “Differences” section of the letter is most striking because after stating that time and distance separate the two writers instead of noting specific differences between the two works, Welty praises Austen. She describes Austen in glowing terms throughout this paragraph, modestly deferring to herself in the two parenthetical comments at the end.

Based on her correspondence, essay, and this note, the novels of Jane Austen were a source of inspiration and a wellspring of joy and comfort to Welty. Welty’s voluminous library (over...