A Dark Rose: Love In Eudora Welty’s Stories and Novels by Sally Wolff (review)

As early as 1944, with the publication of Robert Penn Warren’s essay “The Love and the Separateness in Miss Welty,” critics have commented on Eudora Welty’s depictions of the beauty and difficulty of human relationships. In her recent examination of love in Welty’s work, A Dark Rose: Love in Eudora Welty’s Stories and Novels, Sally Wolff explains that “the majority of Welty’s forty-five short stories and five novels focus on love or its absence” (p. 3). When Wolff commented to Welty, “You have written a great deal about love,” Welty’s reply was “What other kind of story is there?” (p. 1). Although the theme of love is pervasive in Welty’s work, its presentation is ambiguous. As Warren’s title points out, love is often paired with “separateness,” or as Gail Mortimer argues in Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (1994), love is often offset by isolation. Wolff’s book delves into the complexity and mystery of Welty’s portrayals of love, arguing that they always come “with a dark side” (p. 1).

Wolff begins her book with a preface aptly entitled “Reminiscences,” detailing her friendship with Welty and their shared interest in gardening inherited from their mothers. In tracing Welty’s depiction of love through the image of a “dark rose,” Wolff’s literary analysis picks up where two recent books on Welty’s interest in gardening leave off. Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown in One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place (2011) relate the history of the garden at Welty’s house in Jackson, and Julia Eichelberger in Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940–1949 (2013) collects the letters Welty wrote to her agent Diarmuid Russell and her friend John Robinson that are filled with comments and reflections on her garden. Wolff’s book then demonstrates one way Welty’s interest in gardening impacts her fiction in the repeated, detailed use of rose imagery connected to the complexity of love.

Throughout the book, Wolff’s reminiscences enrich her analysis as her knowledge of Welty the person enables her to make interesting observations about Welty’s work. Wolff details, for example, the research Welty did to write the early stories focusing on individuals in poverty. Through an interview with Welty, Wolff learned that Welty read the county newspapers to get a sense of life in rural Mississippi, a practice that led to the depiction of Ruby Fisher reading the newspaper in “A Piece of News” (1941). In her reading of “At the Landing” (1943), Wolff connects Welty’s own description of herself as a “shy person who eventually plunges into life and love” with Jenny’s innocent hesitancy to confront the world (p. 47). Wolff’s use of these biographical connections makes her book as much a tribute to Welty as the rose garden Wolff has planted in honor of Welty and their garden-loving mothers.

By considering the thread of love through all of Welty’s works, Wolff provides a good general overview of the literature, so her book would be useful to readers unfamiliar with Welty’s work or to teachers looking for helpful context. In addition to supplying brief histories of literary criticism on each work she discusses, Wolff gives multiple possible interpretations, such as her readings of “The Wide Net” (1943) as a domestic drama about the relationship of a young couple on the verge of parenthood, as a story that evokes war, and as a narrative that is actually a dream sequence. Literary scholars more familiar with Welty’s work will find value in the close readings and in Wolff’s admirable attention to detail. In her reading of “A Curtain of Green” (1941), for example, Wolff notes that the “repetition of the word ‘beat’ indicates [Mrs. Larkin’s] building frustration,” leading her to...