Eudora Welty admires Jane Austen and owes much to her and indeed stands in the same relation to fellow-Mississippian William Faulkner that Austen stood to [Walter] Scott. With little interest in history or social themes, she concentrates on the ordinary people of her country who go about the business of loving and hating and talking about their neighbors as if there were nothing more important in the world. But within this close range, she scrutinizes her subject and registers its vibrations with a tenderness of attention that places her closer to the heartbeat of her region than Faulkner himself.

If she shows greater variation than her eighteenth-century predecessor, it is not because her aim is different but because she lives in another age and her work inevitably shows it. Like Miss Austen, she remains aloof from social and political events of her time, but with one important difference. In spite of the French Revolution and Napoleon, England was confident and self-contained, and the Catherines, Elizabeths, and Emmas could go on flirting and finding husbands in a way of life that was apparently immutable. After two hundred years, even though Miss Welty's village remains intact, the world outside is not, and disturbing voices are beginning to be heard. Instead of writing about home and social ties, the old standbys of the English novel, young writers today are peering, in Miss Welty's words, through "knot-holes of isolation."

She does not take much to isolation—as no one could who believes in the family as she does—but feels very keenly the plight of the individual who pursues his own dream, never quite going the whole way perhaps but suffering from loneliness even while playing his part in the family life. Thus in the midst of what appears light comedy, she shifts abruptly to the subjective, and at times in fact appears uncertain where her main interest lies, with the individual or the social circle he belongs to. She veers from characters like Miss Eckhart and Miss Julia Mortimer and the other seekers of "the golden apples" to the village at large, loud with the clatter of ordinary life. Jane Austen's interest could not have been so divided because her audience would not have tolerated the private eye in fiction. She keeps passion offstage, concealed in a social mode, and so achieves a synthesis that Miss Welty's fiction lacks.

The gulf between "June Recital" and "Why I Live at the P. O.," for example, is very great indeed. One is in the major, the other a minor key. Miss Eckhart, Virgie Rainey, and Cassie Morrison are tragic figures, while in the other story Miss Welty is out for fun and the reader is not asked to consider what lies behind the old maid's spiteful antics. These disparities, however, are more apparent than real. In the long view, as one takes leave of a Welty story, the private voice is lost in the hubbub of family or community at large: the vision is essentially social. Whatever problems the individual may have—and they are sometimes very great indeed—can best be dealt with among those he knows best in some sort of conformity to the general pattern.

This public rather than private view sets her work in perspective, frames it in time and space and, like Miss Austen's, adorns it with the particularities of her culture, which to the outside world at least seems almost as remote as eighteenth-century Hampshire…. Of all the Southern writers, Miss Welty is most sensitive to the grace of manner and to those dissonances that threaten from the outside. Such is the precarious balance of her world, where not much seems to happen except a lot of talk but where in fact she outlines in her own quiet way what being civilized is all about. (pp. 771-72)

Miss Welty is a very private person with a bent for writing about private experience, however much she participates in community life. Her most dramatic moments are in this vein, when like the poet she explores the inarticulate region of the mind and heart. She shows a predilection towards the character, usually female, who dramatizes her loneliness—like Cassie Morrison in "June Recital" and Shelley Fairchild in Delta Wedding—and wonders why nothing ever happens to her as other lives are being fulfilled. (p. 772)

This type of character is recurrent in Miss Welty's fiction—Nina Carmichael, Laura McRaven, Lexie Renfro, Laurel Hand are variations—but too passive to command much interest, even when, as in the case of Laurel, she is given a leading role…. But there are other lonely characters who excite more interest because they do not stand still, who lurch out at life, sudden, grotesque, and finally impotent, in a game they are obviously not fitted for. Miss Eckhart, the piano teacher of "June Recital," is anything but passive. She came to Morgana, Mississippi, and in spite of aversion to her foreign ways, set up a studio, took in pupils, and made a home for her old mother. For this she was respected, but later her private life became a matter of attention. (pp. 772-73)

Only the life that sparkles around these sad, wasted lives, usually on a lower level of mind and character, makes them bearable at all. But Miss Welty takes [these characters] very seriously. With them her manner becomes tense and concentrated, she has absolute control. Even so, she will not wholly join with them and subscribe to their partial view when there is so much going on in the world that they cannot or will not see. They look out from a promontory over the heads of their neighbors, who figure not so much as fellow human beings as mere possibilities in some scheme of rearrangement. More than is good for them, they are touched by pride. The June recital is the one great event in the music teacher's year but only another occasion to the ladies of Morgana—like Miss Nell's rook parties—where they can dress up and come together. (p. 774)

[The reader] is concerned with a fundamental question which lies at the heart of Miss Welty's work: Is simple animal happiness enough, or must one be involved with those intangibles of character that she obviously admires in Miss Julia and Miss Eckhart? And what about those who seem to be left out altogether, to whom nothing ever happens? The questions are not answered—perhaps there is no answer—and so Miss Welty returns to the cheerfulness of social life. "There's something I think's better to have than love," says Edna Earl in The Ponder Heart; "that's company." And for the long stretch, Miss Welty seems to agree. Since so often there is no rationale behind suffering, what is to be done except to recognize it with pity and turn back to life, where happiness is not evenly distributed but where there is a great deal for everyone if he will accept it. Beyond this charmed circle, disturbing cries are being heard in the novels of her contemporaries, but here at least it is still possible to live the good life. And the good life is the most important matter of consideration to Miss Welty. (p. 775)

[Miss Welty's] type of comedy can exist only on a foundation of social order where certain principles are quietly observed. Quietness is one of her virtues….

In "The Burning," her only story about the Civil War, she describes the destruction by the Federal Army of a home outside Jackson, where two sisters, living alone with their servants, hang themselves after the burning and the rape of the younger. Miss Welty is not trying to revive old partisan feelings: the fate of the sisters is symbolic. Not only a house is destroyed but the decency of life by an intrusive element incapable of understanding what it destroys. When a soldier rides a horse into the parlor where the ladies are sitting, the elder sister turns indifferently to her maid: "Delilah, what is it you came in your dirty apron to tell me?" (p. 776)

["The Burning" is] Miss Welty's way of pointing up social values: men should be able to live, if not with love, at least with civility and mutual respect. (pp. 776-77)

Miss Welty believes in place in fiction and spends a lot of time with it—as important, she says, as plot and character—which means first of all the feel of a particular landscape at a particular time of the year. The peculiar light on the cotton fields, goldenrod, and yellow butterflies mean fall, which gives the novel a reflective richness…. Miss Welty, at home with the changing moods of nature, is scrupulous with detail, though the casual reader might overlook how much of the gardener's heart is in her work. Flowers are a special province, the wild as well as garden variety, the enumeration of which becomes a kind of poetry…. (pp. 777-78)

But place involves more than the natural world or the people who happen to live there. It means rather the two together, after generations of interaction of one upon the other. Time is the important element. (p. 778)

Miss Welty knows that life fully lived involves time and place and complex relationships with other human beings. The past is in it, and the future, and the present moment is always a shared experience…. (pp. 779-80)

Delta Wedding has been called a comedy of love, because that is the impression one brings away from it, the almost unreal extent to which kindliness, if not love, radiates from one character to another. But there is no false sentiment and no misconception about the surface tranquility; Miss Welty understands human nature too well. (p. 780)

[The Fairchilds's] success and happiness may look smug and proprietary, but Miss Welty has no qualms about it. The Fairchilds have achieved something rare and precious, and that is the point of her story….

Delta Wedding is Miss Welty's representation—a dream perhaps, but a dream in close conformity to the life of her region—of what it is like to live in a civilized order.

Eudora Welty's achievement is wonderfully varied because of the susceptible nature of her mind, which takes life generously as it comes. Both joy and pain are in it, both intensely private, but at the same time part of a larger corporate experience. Life itself is a mystery to be gratefully received and lived with as much wisdom as one and his fellows can bring to bear on it.

Unlike most writers of our time, including William Faulkner, she has stayed clear of the timely topics, especially tempting to Southern authors, who for the last generation of social change have had an audience ready and waiting for them. The writer, she insists, must keep an eye upon the ages, not one disturbing season. She shows less interest in cataclysms that affect nations than in the private experience of living—the way a person greets a new day, or walks in a garden, or reacts to the face one meets on the street. In this large perspective, the social problems of her region are not important at all. (p. 781)

Eudora Welty, like Jane Austen, speaks with authority because she avoids theory and contention and sticks to the fact as she sees it in the world about her…. Her people know or care little about what goes on in the world beyond, but they know each other, are functionally connected with each other and the place they live in, and from these associations have learned a great deal about how to live. They would not be able to express what they have learned, but that is Miss Welty's business. Their lives may seem unimportant when set against the big issues of the moment, but not to the reader whose ear is attuned to the quiet wisdom beneath the social comedy. (p. 782)