The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon ed. by Christine Flanagan (review)

Edited by Christine Flanagan, The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon traces the remarkable friendship of two of the most prominent women of southern letters through more than a decade of correspondence and supplemental documentation that adds significant dimension to their relationship. Although attempts to collect, edit, and anthologize their letters were made in the 1970s and 1980s—most notably by Sally Fitzgerald, who was friends with both authors—this volume is a noteworthy addition to the Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon literature due to its completeness and its historical contextualization (through Flanagan’s interspersed commentary) of their correspondence and the post–World War II southern literary circle to which they belonged.

As the wife of poet and New Critic Allen Tate, and as a novelist and short story writer in her own right, Gordon interacted and collaborated with American authors who were active during the interwar and postwar years, from Vanderbilt Agrarians John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren; to Modernists Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell; to southern Gothic writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Gordon first encountered O’Connor when she was asked to review a manuscript of Wise Blood (1952), O’Connor’s first novel. This sparked a thirteen-year friendship that lasted until O’Connor’s death from lupus—their relationship, as this collection illustrates, involved extensive letter-writing between Gordon, the mentor, and O’Connor, the protégée.

As Flanagan expresses in her introduction, the edited volume is the result of years of scavenging in the archives—specifically those at Georgia College and State University, Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, Emory University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—which yielded the sixty-six letters featured in the collection, sixty of which have never been previously published. The letters are notable for their insight into the craft of writing, how each author shaped the other’s work, and how their mutual, constructive criticism contributed to the evolution of what have become literary classics. As Flanagan contends, “Scholars who have argued over how much credence O’Connor placed in Gordon’s comments might now reexamine O’Connor manuscripts to evaluate the impact of Gordon’s teaching, both on O’Connor’s style and content” (p. 14). Moreover, these primary sources also function as a window into the lives of the two women, particularly the challenges they faced in the male-dominated genre of fiction.

The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon is divided into five parts: the first four focus on the O’Connor works Wise Blood (1952), A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1953), “The Enduring Chill” (1965), and “Revelation” (1965) and their associated correspondence. Part 5 examines the period between O’Connor’s and Gordon’s deaths, mostly through Gordon’s correspondence with mutual friend Ashley Brown and editor Robert Giroux. By far the shortest section, Part 5 is perhaps the most poignant, for it demonstrates how Gordon remained O’Connor’s staunch supporter, even after the latter’s untimely death in 1964, perpetuating O’Connor’s legacy until Gordon’s own death in 1981 by sharing O’Connor’s work with a new generation of readers and writers.