[In her Collected Stories] Eudora Welty's real self percolates into a generous fiction that wastes very little time on disapproval. She wanders, marveling, over the landscape of soul and senses, never allowing the smallest fluctuation in either to escape her, but she is not a moralist. She has no vocation for rectitude, and one can search in vain among dozens of her springy, piquant, often irascible characters for those implications of psychological delinquency that give such dramatic tension to the stories of Henry James. Yet she is no less a psychologist; she simply is more interested in our efforts and longings than in our guilts and weaknesses. (p. 3)

Whenever she discerns a fault in someone, she leaves room for an advantage or a felicity. In "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," three biddies of an age to wear widow's black and get hot easily are about to plump a slightly retarded young lady into an institution for the feeble-minded, presumably for her own happiness. When they find her at home packing a hope chest (so far she has collected one bar of soap and a wash rag) and preparing to get married to a traveling xylophone player, the ladies are aghast—in good part because she has outwitted their pessimism and shattered their complacency. This ignoble sentiment would no doubt be the chief disclosure for some other writer, but it is their sheepishness and hesitation that Miss Welty wants to call to our attention….

Miss Welty unnerves us with the possibility of violence in a gentle woman mainly to stir us, as her characters are often painfully stirred, to a realization of cosmic forces. The only lesson for them or us to learn is that we must accede graciously. But while that is the course she would recommend, she takes it for granted that most of the human species is awkward indeed at coming to grips with fate.

The partly autobiographical "June Recital," a shimmering flashback to the poetry and wonder of life at the age of 12, creates a marvelous balance sheet of benign and thwarting experience, setting side by side family happiness and bitter isolation, the carefree next to the crabbed, the magnolia-scented sensuous warmth of the South against its small-town indifference to those who are not lucky. (p. 4)

By the time [Eudora Welty] gets to her last volume, The Golden Apples, she is weaving rich skeins of family and town connections, drawing more sustenance for her writing as clans proliferate and neighbors meet, and making us feel very much at home…. A story delightfully anachronistic in the midst of current fiction, "Shower of Gold," is narrated by Mrs. Rainey as she is churning butter. The albino Miss Snowdie marries, to the astonishment of all, the picturesque King MacLain, who promptly deserts her. Reappearing after a few years, he invites her to a midnight tryst in the woods which issues in twins, but he is gone by morning. The solicitous narrator marvels that Snowdie bears her wandering husband no rancor….

"Shower of Gold" is not in the least sentimental. But it is enchanting, partly because it parodies a Greek myth in which Zeus (King of the Gods and a philanderer, like King McLain) visits Danaë in her subterranean cell and impregnates her with Perseus in a stream of sunlight. Miss Welty's readers cannot be expected to know all the myths and folk tales she has been devouring since childhood, but the aura of her fascination is communicated to us.

A gathering of town people, a hero who confronts fairytale hazards and obstacles for the sake of love, high spirits in the face of dire events—all combine, in "The Wide Net," to produce a texture as recognizably Weltian as The Marriage of Figaro is Mozartian….

When we read Eudora Welty's intricate, gossipy stories, with their layers upon layers of brewing memories and opulent images, we are frequently unprepared for the fine point to which they are directed. "No Place for You, My Love," as complex a tale as can be found today, begins with two strangers who meet in a New Orleans restaurant, sense a possible ambiguous sympathy, and worry about giving in to it. The man speculates that the woman is in the middle of a hopeless love affair and invites her for a ride south of the city. Making small gestures toward one another and instantly backing away, they submerge their emotions in the speed of the ride, the intense heat that envelops them, the intoxication of the Southern landscape….

Although the love waiting in the wings of this haunting story has been evaded (for reasons of circumstance or psychology that the author wisely leaves unspecified), it is much less a narrative of nonfulfillment and paralysis à la James' "The Beast in the Jungle," than a recognition of the urge in all human beings toward passionate life: The physical universe, vibrantly described (it resounds through Miss Welty's writing as if she were some giant cello) is constantly heaping coals upon that fire. Like most of Eudora Welty's stories, "No Place for You, My Love" baffles us and, at the same time, refers to a deep and primary emotion we can all share. (p. 5)