Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (review)

Flannery O’Connor has never really gone out of fashion. She was fortunate in that she gained critical acclaim during her lifetime, and attention to her work from critics in literary studies has only increased since the posthumous publication of her letters in The Habit of Being (1973), edited by Sally Fitzgerald. As of 2014, O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was the most anthologized American short story in high school and college textbooks while, today, critical essays about her work appear regularly in diverse groups of media. Additionally, two extensive biographies have been written about her in the last decade.

Still, an important feature of O’Connor studies remains in flux, even today: her Catholic faith. Many literary critics either tread lightly in this area because they lack the knowledge – and, perhaps, the interest – in Catholicism and in theological aesthetics, generally, or they reduce her faith commitment to an idiosyncrasy that is quickly dismissed as tangential to her work. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s short biography, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith, however, avoids this common maneuver. Instead, she offers a valuable contribution to this conversation by convincingly exploring O’Connor’s deep understanding of her Catholic faith and how this faith transformed her art. O’Donnell brings great insight into how the logic and practice of O’Connor’s faith frame her stories, which are filled with the drama of violence, suffering, and mystery. This theological biography is a superb addition to O’Connor studies and will also serve Catholic Studies well.

O’Donnell, herself a noted Catholic scholar and artist, excels at making O’Connor’s faith development integral to understanding the texture of her stories. The biography is structured in a basic chronology, but draws on O’Connor’s theological and spiritual reading to frame the analysis of her art. O’Donnell is fortunate to have O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal – written while O’Connor was a twenty-one year old graduate student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop – at her disposal. One immediately sees not only the breadth of O’Connor’s formative years of reading and writing, but also her desire to have Christian principles permeate her art. O’Donnell observes, “the two lives [O’Connor] was leading – that of a faithful Catholic and that of a student in a secular university characterized largely by a culture of unbelief – were brought into conflict with one another on a daily basis. The [prayer] journal allowed Flannery space with which to create a ‘rare colloquy’ between two worlds” (33). O’Donnell’s biography thus charts the trajectory of O’Connor’s life and work as an ongoing colloquy between the world of faith and the world of art.

In each chapter, O’Donnell explores the deep theological resonances of O’Connor’s spiritual maturation in light of her stories. If the chapter on A Prayer Journal provides a context for understanding the early formation of O’Connor as a committed Catholic and committed writer in Iowa, then the following chapter, titled “Northern Sojourn” (about her time in the northeast – New York City, Yaddo, and Connecticut with the Fitzgeralds) focuses on what kind of Catholic author she would become. According to O’Donnell, O’Connor “wanted to write about the world she knew – that of the American South and the wonderfully strange people that populated its towns and countryside. What made a work Catholic was the belief of the artist in a universe ‘founded on the theological truths of the Faith, but particularly on three of them which are basic – the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment” (48). The palimpsest of every story by O’Connor becomes the drama of Christian salvation.

O’Donnell’s chapters continue to juxtapose important moments in O’Connor’s life – whether it be the friends she made, the texts she read, or the suffering she endured – with the important characters, settings, and symbolic...