To hear Eudora Welty tell it [in Eye of the Story] she was born to read….

Miss Welty has never gotten her fill of fiction. In a beautiful image she describes the effect of fiction on her life: as a child she was taken into the darkness of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave; when the guide struck a light she was dazzled by all the splendor of the rock formations that had been around her all along. So fiction lights up the experience that would otherwise slip by us unnoticed. That is to say, Miss Welty regards fiction as an exploration of reality, each new fiction "some fresh approximation of human truth." She would not dismiss that reality consisting solely of material objects, a view of the world so entrancing these days, but she clearly thinks that a superior reality derives from the morality which resides in human relationships. That reality is most clearly revealed to us by fiction, which can intensify our personal response by suffusing it with the accumulated insight of the race.

"Making reality real is art's responsibility," Miss Welty asserts in her famous "Place in Fiction," and she has held fiction—for her the most realistic of art's forms—severely to account. But if she has had high expectations for fiction, she has been quick to praise when her expectations have been met. (p. 215)

Eudora Welty early discovered that, as instructive to her soul as another's fiction might be (and this is the testimony in each of her essays about other writers), it ultimately remained that person's province. At that point she knew that either she could be thankful for, or at least content with, a world defined by others or she could attempt to craft her own, even though the labor would consume her life. (pp. 215-16)

Miss Welty's fictions testify that she is blessed with a profound insight—there are times when she conveys life's fragility with a pain that hurts like an autumn day. But the plentitude of her fictions and the brilliance of her essays "On Writing" declare that she has not let brilliance keep her from working at her craft.

These essays on her tools, especially "Place in Fiction" and "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," reveal a craftsmanship that is filled with pride, in the sense that Miss Welty sees pride in Katherine Anne Porter's prose, that is, "pride in the language, pride in using the language to search out human meanings, pride in making a good piece of work." Miss Welty's work (and that word cannot be too much stressed) reveals self-respect and satisfaction in effort spent, those meanings of "pride" she detects in Miss Porter's work. (p. 216)

For more than forty years Eudora Welty has, in her urgency, made magnificent use of her tools. For too many of those years she was that other writer from Mississippi or one of that wondrous generation of Southern women writers. Even yet there is not a body of criticism commensurate to her achievement—too often she suffers when the generalizations about Southern literature or about any one of her fellow practitioners are applied to her.

But with the colligation here of her own best pieces of criticism there can no longer be any excuse for mistreating her. Her critical perceptions about other writers are like boomerangs: they fly straight to their mark, but if that target should be removed, they speed directly back to her. There they join the body of comment that she has made about (her own) technique. All in all, what the comments say is that Eudora Welty must know more about loneliness than ever Robinson Crusoe did. Loneliness here is not understood as social isolation, but that vision which has, if only for a moment, glimpsed the flimsiness of all those social constructions that advertise communion. Miss Welty's characters are obsessed to talk, and sometimes the complaint is heard that nothing happens except talk in a Welty novel. That is precisely the point: nothing happens—and would happen more if we did not talk…. In her own Mammoth Cave, Eudora Welty has been lighting candles against time and death all these years. (pp. 216-17)