[In the following review, Shields discusses three books: a biography of Eudora Welty, a collection of her book reviews, and her novel The Optimist's Daughter.]

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives. This stern rootedness has always compounded the wonderment in Miss Welty's admirers, for there is, first, her long list of writing accomplishments to contemplate, and then an accompanying respect for her serene, unwriterly willingness to stay put. She is, in a sense, a curiosity in American literary history, a writer who stayed home, who has lived, in fact, in the same house she moved to with her family when she was a girl of sixteen.

Her five novels, her dozens of short stories and essays, and her fine memoir One Writer's Beginnings, all found their sense and shape in an upstairs bedroom of the Welty house on Pinehurst Street. The mention of this upstairs bedroom may call to mind Emily Dickinson (another writer who kept to her room), but the comparison fails from the start; Eudora Welty's writing has always turned outward to embrace the society she was born into, and her life, moreover, has been characterized by a rare richness of friendship. Old friends, familiar surroundings, conversation, books, occasional travel, the pleasures of the post, the sustaining power of routine in a small and knowable city; these seem the steady forces that have nurtured her gift—a gift which is often described as being uniquely Southern.

Most serious readers of fiction are acquainted with the work of William Faulkner, and are on speaking terms with Walker Percy or Toni Morrison, and so have overcome their apprehensions about the universe of critters, grits and Grandaddy-catching frogs-down-by-the-swamp. Southern writing—whatever that phrase embodies—is lyrically seductive and, at its best, brings fresh narrative news from another frontier.

North Americans love their regional pigeon-holes. The sheer immensity of continental space drives writers, and critics, into the consolation of shared corners, hunkering down with their geographical fellows, becoming New England writers, Western writers, writers of the Great Plains, even attaching themselves to smaller subdivisions: Montana writers, North Carolina writers (of which there seem a disproportionate number), San Francisco writers, Marin County writers, and, of course, that pressing throng of writers from the South, including writers from the "deep South". We almost never speak of Northern writers, perhaps because this largest-by-far category is simply "the other" against which "the rest" are poised and compared.

There's more than self-interest behind these clusterings. The tug of landscape plays a part, certainly, and the reliability of an accessible human network, but there are also the comforts of related syntax and, finally, a strong comradely resistance to the monolith of New York publishing, with its perceived appetites and modus operandi.

Such territorial groupings, not nearly cohesive enough to be called "schools", shatter quickly under analysis. Every theory of regional writing produces its contrary example, and, in fact, writers, even those eager enough to support local presses or literary magazines, are the first to resist identification by geographical category. Eudora Welty, reviewing Marguerite Steedman's novel But You'll Be Back, in 1942, objects to the jacket copy which advertises the book's characters as being "Normal Southern" people; This is "a jolting phrase", she writes, and she hopes it "does not indicate that hereafter southern people are to be subdivided after having already been divided from the rest of the country".

Two years later, reviewing a novel by the mostly forgotten Harry Harrison Kroll, Miss Welty says, "This is a distinctly Southern Book, in that every word springs straight up from Southern earth." Kroll's attachment to a recognizable terrain seems as far as Eudora Welty is willing to go in isolating qualities of "Southernness". Interestingly, it is only in these two early reviews that the "Southern question" is raised; her later reviews avoid the subject almost entirely. It may be that she despaired of defining so slippery an essence as regionalism; perhaps the breadth of her reading—she was discovering South American fiction as early as the 1940s—made her sceptical of arbitrary enclosures.

The University Press of Mississippi has now published Eudora Welty's complete collected book reviews, sixty-seven, written between the years 1942 and 1984, most of them for the New York Times Book Review: Pearl Amelia McHaney can be thanked for bringing this graceful collection together. The availability of Welty's critical work locates the author historically, enlarging our understanding of the evolving Welty aesthetic, and creating a sort of subjunctive biography which will be especially enlightening for those who believe that the books we read form a part of our consciousness, and sometimes the best part.

For close to fifty years Eudora Welty has been reading books and setting down her impressions, always with sensitivity and with an exceptional openness, even a kind of gaiety—something that appears to have gone out of book-reviewing. The collection can be seen as a random slice of publishers' offerings in the middle years of our century, and random it certainly is. Welty must have been more than once surprised by what she was given for review: there are wobbly first novels here, histories, essays, letters and journals, mysteries, children's fiction, fairy-tales, art books, even a how-to book for window-box gardeners. But along the way came such writers as S. J. Perelman, William Sansom, Faulkner, Rose Macaulay, Isak Dinesen, J. D. Salinger, V. S. Pritchett, Patrick White, E. M. Forster, whose work she adores, Elizabeth Bowen, a close friend, and Virginia Woolf, about whom she writes brilliantly.

The simplicity of Eudora Welty's opening sentences are a rebuke to those reviewers who stand on their heads to be clever. "This is a book of twenty-one short stories"; "These are stories and sketches collected from writings over a period of several years"; or "This is a disarming book, and a pleasure to read". Her strategy is classical. She provides a brief description of the work, followed by a careful, balanced analysis, and her strength lies in identifying—sharply, wittily, often metaphorically—the centre of a writer's power, or else a debilitating weakness. Of Colette she says, "She writes indeed of love", but "not with her love". Of Sylvia Townsend Warner: "Miss Warner is careful never to lose herself beyond a point where wit will not bring her back." Of a convoluted paragraph in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she writes, "I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times".

She shows an early appreciation of Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen, and her particular enthusiasms may send readers back to the delights of Perelman, or scurrying after a second-hand copy of Marianne Thornton: A domestic biography by E. M. Forster. These critical pieces, written between Welty's novels and short stories, will stand as "a graceful and imperturbable monument to interruption", which is the phrase she herself uses to describe Virginia Woolf's journalism.

She is less than sympathetic in her review of Arthur Mizener's biography of Ford Madox Ford, The Saddest Story. Mizener, she says, makes the mistake of alternating his clumsy "coarse-grained" comments with Ford's carefully cadenced prose, and the result is "like being carried in a train along the southern coast of France—long tunnel, blinding view of the sea, and over again". This, unhappily, is the problem faced by Paul Binding in his critical memoir, The Still Moment: Eudora Welty, Portrait of a Writer. It may be that literary studies like The Still Moment are doomed to be clumsy and mechanistic, since traditional critical methods have demanded comment—those endless tunnels—followed by concrete evidence in the form of a quoted passage. Eudora Welty's luminous and highly textured language presses again and again against the darkness of Binding's vague, awkward, hesitantly offered commentary. "Since her early years she had wanted to be a writer, and had indeed written things." Things? Or, speaking of a photograph Eudora Welty had taken, he writes, "This picture also brings home to me, more than its fellows, both the strength—and eternity, if you prefer—of a moment and its helplessness in the inexorable forward march of Time." After quoting a passage from Delta Wedding, he sums up with: "This passage brings us a fresh realization of the disturbing coexistences of ordinary life, and of the extreme difficulty (and danger) of simplifying things [those things again] with ready moral judgments."

This is a valuable book none the less. Between his dutiful paragraphs of exegesis, Binding assembles an affectionate and penetrating portrait. Eudora Welty, he reminds us, is a Southerner by birth, but her parents came from more northerly states and were able to provide their daughter with an outsider's eye. Welty herself was educated in the North, first at the University of Wisconsin, then Columbia where she studied advertising. The Depression drew her back to Mississippi, and there she found work with the WPA (Works Progress Administration), travelling to every corner of the state, conducting person-to-person interviews and taking, for her own pleasure, photographs of her fellow Mississippians. This field-work, undertaken with youthful ardour, was to form the rich material of her fiction. Binding underlines the importance of Welty's fortunate apprenticeship. The photographs, which she developed herself, deepened her sense of the human image rooted in its landscape, and her interviews animated these images, so that her fiction vibrates with the lively orality so often associated with "Southern" writing.

Wisely, Binding refuses to be throttled by a precise definition of what Southern writing is. For, despite innumerable studies devoted to its analysis, and hundreds of college courses designed around its contours, Southern writing is, in the end, almost what anyone wants it to be—writing about the South, or writing set in the South, writing by writers born in the South, who have passed through the South, who have Southern antecedents or who express themselves through the use of Southern locutions. (A certain amount of confusion exists about whether the word Southern should be capitalized, though the "S" in South is almost always in upper case.)

There are those who feel that there can be no Southern writing since there is no longer a stable South; the old agricultural South is fast becoming suburbanized; Southerners now watch the same television programmes as other Americans, and avail themselves of the same fast-food and consumer products. Race and gender may be the webs that hold us together now, not the accidents of geography. Some insist that Southern writing cannot be defined, but only felt; that it falls on the ear with a detectable but indescribable Southern slant; that it's romantically inflated, a forced garden, writing that is slightly out of control with an unreliable traffic director. For Reynolds Price, it contains, almost always, the consciousness of race. For others, it holds the memory imprint of the colonized or defeated. It is lush, Gothic, rural, claustrophobic, informed by a humour that lies broad in the brain, drawing its narratives from folk stories, from anecdotes, from tall tales, from language that bends easily to metaphor. It is less about the arabesque of the unfolded self than about the way families and communities work.

John Barth, who is sometimes, but not always, classified as a Southern writer, claims that the most important narrative question for the writer is not "What happened?" but "Who am I?" On the other hand, a narrative question closer to the Southern sense of story-telling might be "Who are we?" or, taking it a centimetre closer to the essence of what a story is, "How are we who we are?" Two of Eudora Welty's novels have been reissued by Virago, and each finds its narrative energy in the conundrum of community.

The Optimist's Daughter is often considered Eudora Welty's most lasting achievement. Published in 1972, it won a Pulitzer Prize, but in today's political climate it feels a little hollow and somehow unsure of itself. Its spareness and its use of vernacular materials point towards an awakening of the liberated self, but the denouement of the novel leaves more questions unanswered than addressed.

Welty's heroine is Laurel, a childless widow in her forties, who travels from Chicago to her family home in the South where she faces her father's illness and death, and where she must confront the egregious Wanda Fay, a heartless, selfish, silly woman, the wife her father married in his old age. Wanda Fay is unique in Eudora Welty's fiction, a vessel of pure evil who remains unredeemed by the author. The novel poses a timeless question: how can we love the parents who have ultimately failed us? Laurel's mother, we are told, ended her life in madness, her father with a foolish alliance, and in the period following his funeral, Laurel disengages herself from the pain of family distress by absorbing into her consciousness all that was good and worthy. But she never thinks to ask herself what it is that has deprived Wanda Fay of a heart, what circumstances have squeezed the woman dry—was it poverty, a failure of acceptance in her own family? Both are hinted at. In the end, Wanda Fay brings more comedy than tragedy to the pages of this puzzling novel, and Laurel returns to the North, carrying with her what may be the seeds of her own heartlessness. The book invites a perplexing double reading: Mr Cheek, a seasonal handyman, in telling Laurel that she resembles her dead mother, can be seen as the messenger of evil or else an astute prophet; the bird that flies into the family house may presage misfortune or the beginning of a necessary cleansing.

The quality of Southernness may be difficult to bottle, but it comes wafting off every page of Losing Battles. It's not just that the characters are called Aunt Beck, Brother Bethune, or Miss Beulah. It's that each of them is provided with an oral gift matched by an aural receptivity. The book is all talk, a whole Sunday of talk that stretches into Monday morning. The time is the 1930s, in the old segregated South; the occasion is the ninetieth birthday of Granny Vaughn; the mood is comic and tender. The chatter goes on and on, passing from gossip to banter to declaration to confession, about buttered biscuits, family bibles, about the fear of entrapment and of death, about fluctuations in faith, about how hot the weather's got; and each of these conversations secures a cultural moment. The novel sprawls in a dozen directions, but always letting in the noise of life.

It is good to have these novels in print. Eudora Welty, besides producing her own fine body of work, has been a major influence on America's Anne Tyler, on Canada's Alice Munro, and on many other writers, men as well as women, who have faced the daunting task of making literature out of the humble clay of home.