During slightly more than twenty years of an active career, Gail Godwin has established herself as one of the most gifted, prolific, and popular late twentieth-century Southern novelists. She has published eight substantial novels, two collections of short stories, numerous perceptive reviews of books by fellow writers, and several long essays setting forth the connections between her life and writing. Indicating her increasing prestige within the literary community are her long-time residence at the artists' colony in Woodstock, New York, the commendations of her work by such established authors as Joyce Carol Oates, John Fowles, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the claims of reviewers that—in a typical though trite observation—she carries forward "the Southern tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty."

As Godwin herself has repeatedly said, much of her fiction is autobiographical in nature. Recognition of this fact is fundamental to an enlightened understanding of her novels. They are grounded in the circumstances of her early life. Her mother and father were divorced shortly after she was born, and she was reared by her mother and grandmother; during her teens and young adulthood her mother remarried, in Godwin's eyes unhappily, and Godwin had unpleasant, embittering experiences with her stepfather. Also during this period, Godwin moved from two unsuccessful early marriages through insecurity and doubts about her abilities as an author to increasing confidence and success in her work. Drawing on these and related matters, Godwin in her fiction of the early 1970s explores the situation of women trapped in unhappy marriages or love affairs: Dane Empson in The Perfectionists (1970), Francesca Bolt in Glass People (1972), Kitty Sparks and Jane Clifford in The Odd Woman (1973), and similar figures. In her later work, continuing to draw on personal experience, Godwin depicts, with ever surer hand, the careers of independent, successful women who are usually connected, as she is, with writing or the arts. Among these women are painter Violet Clay in Violet Clay (1978), actress Justin Stokes in The Finishing School (1985), and author Clare Campion in A Southern Family (1987).

Aesthetically, Godwin has employed and mastered several established strains in literature, among them realism, fantasy, allegory, folktale, and myth, using personal experience as the basis for excursions into highly imaginative material. Yet despite her achievements in literary art, unlike other postmodern writers like Anne Tyler, whom in range and productivity she resembles, Godwin has not yet been fully assimilated into Southern literary canons. In this essay I propose to examine briefly what I see as the major reasons for her exclusion, and then to argue for her inclusion by looking at her dexterity in mode and technique, her sensitive portrayals of women who struggle with the kinds of problems she herself has had to contend with, and the shifts in the personal and social circumstances of a various characters in her fiction that originate in the difficulties caused by family, race, and class relationships in the late twentieth-century South.

The two main reasons for Godwin's exclusion from the canon are probably her consistent appearance on best-seller lists, which undermines her claim to be considered a serious writer, and her feminism—or, perhaps more accurately, the standard perception of how she handles feminist issues in her work. In regard to her popularity, the situation may be generally described as follows. Because education in America has historically been the domain of the privileged classes, both makers of canons and so-called canonized authors have been suspicious of popular writers, particularly of popular women writers—as, in different ways, Hawthorne's complaint about the "d―d mob of scribbling women" and Thomas Wolfe's description of Gone With The Wind as an "immortal piece of bilge" make clear. From Frank Yerby to Gail Godwin, the popularity of an author has diminished his or her chances for inclusion in a canon that traditionally has been shaped by often elitist academics as well as by critics, publishers, and authors intent on protecting their own dominions, even though the majority of canonical authors—Hawthorne, Henry James, and Wolfe among others—were widely read and influential during their lifetimes.

But the charge occasionally made by critics that Godwin's work stands halfway between serious and popular writing must be dealt with, because it is also true that persistent popularity may lead a writer who is responsive to the demands of her public to cheapen or diminish, however unwittingly, her art. Any suspicions that Godwin's popularity has diminished her artistic achievement may be silenced. I believe, by a glance at her skill in various literary modes and her persistent experimentation with technique. Godwin has worked, with impressive range and virtuosity, in diverse, even divergent, strains in literature—with realism in A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), with fantasy in the title story of her first short story collection, Dream Children (1976), with allegory in the widely taught story from Dream Children, "A Sorrowful Woman," and with mythic or folkloric structures in The Finishing School. Godwin's talent in technical experimentation is shown at its best, perhaps, in A Southern Family (1987), one of her most impressive novels to date. In this long, complicated book centering on three generations of a western North Carolina family with ties through marriage both to city life and to the mountains, Godwin experiments, in a manner recalling such modernist authors as Faulkner, with structural elements involving disruption of chronological time and multiple points of view.

The issue of Godwin's feminism may be dealt with fairly briefly. To my knowledge her stand on broadly feminist issues has not, thus far at any rate, been seriously criticized, but then neither has the kind of feminism she displays in her writing been fully understood or explored. The author of an essay published in 1980 alleges, for example, that the nature of Godwin's feminist concerns, and her method of presenting them, ally her more closely with such writers as Jane Austen and George Eliot than with more recent, more radical feminist authors—a claim perhaps fueled by Godwin's slightly acerbic review of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women ("One Woman Leads to Another"). That such a statement in an otherwise perceptive essay does less than justice to Godwin's writing is made evident by the following fact. All Godwin's novels, from The Perfectionists in 1970 to Father Melancholy's Daughter in 1991, center upon young women struggling to attain their independence, establish their identity, and successfully pursue their work despite the restraints of male-dominated culture and with or without the companionship or support of men.

Many aspects of Godwin's work connect it with the historical conditions of Southern culture and literature, and render it worthy of inclusion in the canons. In her most important novels, Godwin treats from one or another angle several elements that over time have characterized Southern civilization, especially the persistently thorny issues of family, race, and social class. Her methods of dealing with these issues reflect her knowledge of Anglo-American literary traditions, to which she gives a recognizably Southern slant, and they also reflect her awareness of both Renascence and postmodern cultural attitudes toward class and race as conveyed in Southern literature. Throughout her long fiction, she explores the central concerns of her protagonists within the context of carefully wrought, finely nuanced depictions of Southern society that make plain the continuing struggles in the region involving family, class, and race.

As already indicated, Godwin filters transformed aspects of personal experience into increasingly complex novels that depict the struggles of ambitious, talented women in late twentieth-century America, sometimes contrasting their problems with those faced by women of earlier generations. In these novels she examines several related concerns, notably those of young women needing the companionship of both women and men, and the relationship among independence, love, marriage, creativity, and freedom. These concerns frequently intersect, with predictably problematic results. Dane Empson and Francesca Bolt, the central figures in The Perfectionists and Glass People respectively, are unhappily married, and neither is able to be creative or productive in her work. Jane Clifford, a university professor in The Odd Woman (1974), seems at first glance better situated than Dane and Francesca because she is educated, single, and self-supporting. Throughout much of the narrative, however, she vacillates between establishing an independent career and adjusting her plans to those of her lover, Gabriel Weeks. Central characters in A Mother and Two Daughters and A Southern Family—notably Cate Galitsky, Lydia Mansfield, and Julia Lowndes—have each been married. But in the present time of these books each is single, with Cate and Lydia having abandoned the security offered by marriage in order to embark on a search for a rewarding type of work. When studied as a group, Godwin's novels tell a single story, that of a woman's difficult but ultimately successful quest for self-definition and a satisfying career with or without the support of other people, especially men.

Connected to the fortunes of these and other figures in Godwin's novels are the changing nature and role of the twentieth-century South. In Godwin's most substantial fiction the South is a region participating in the mainstream of contemporary American life while experiencing the upheavals of sunbelt explosion. But it is also a region that exhibits distinctive cultural traditions expressed through the conflicts among different generations, races, and social classes. In her early novels, Godwin is more interested in exploring the problems that marriage causes her protagonists than she is in elaborating upon Southern social and racial experience. But as she moves in her later work toward depicting heroines who, whether married or not, are established in successful careers, she also moves from Southern settings that are only briefly sketched to full, thoughtful examinations within the context of Southern culture of the apparently perennial human issues of family, race, and class.

Godwin uses Southern settings in each of her novels after The Perfectionists. But in Glass People, The Odd Woman, Violet Clay, and The Finishing School, she depicts the region chiefly in sections of the novels that occur in the past, and hence it functions as a background for the main action rather than as an important influence upon it. Perhaps as a consequence, Godwin's descriptions of the South in these books are short and lightly parodic. The widowed mother of young Justin Stokes in The Finishing School, for instance, eventually marries a suitor from South Carolina who bears an honored patronymic in the state, that of Ravenel. And Violet Clay in the novel of the title spends a summer in Charleston, a fact that enables Godwin to play with old Charleston pedigrees, evoke the charm of historic customs like the St. Cecilia Ball, and invent distinctive regional names like that of the old "Fortescue-Clay House," a designation that evokes the names of such venerable Charleston dwellings as the Heyward-Washington house.

In the books that constitute perhaps her most impressive work to date, A Mother and Two Daughters and A Southern Family, Godwin gives the South extended and thoughtful treatment. As a postmodern Southern author, she is not involved in the probing inquiry into the historical conditions of Southern culture that fueled the writing of the Renascence; and she often exhibits little sympathy with outmoded aristocratic customs. But she is obviously concerned with the problems that time, change, industrialization, and ostensible progress have caused inhabitants of the late twentieth-century South. With deft satire, for instance, she comments through Julia Lowndes in A Southern Family upon the triumph of unenlightened egalitarian developments over gracious patrician customs in North Carolina. While driving her father to a friend's home, Julia notes that "the Van Camps' vast meadowland, where their show horses used to romp and graze, had become a private golf course for a community of mansard-roofed dwellings called "'Townhouse Acres.'" Julia's elderly father, who is "never more lively than when he [has] things to sneer at," deplores "the nailed-down shag carpeting, the democratically identical balconies overlooking the picture-postcard views," the "cupids in a fountain surrounded by too many colors of impatiens," and the "'color-coordinated'" bathrooms and kitchens." "If it's all the same to you," he tells Julia, "I'd prefer to finish out my days in that old-fashioned thing called a house, even if I do have a stroke while mowing my lawn."

One of the most striking elements in Godwin's fiction—yet one that even the best of her critics has overlooked—is her portrayal of the changes in several generations of Southern families as they confront class and race divisions in the late twentieth-century South. In her novels Godwin depicts a full range of social classes, represented by patricians Neville Richardson, Anthony Gallant, and Alicia Gallant in A Southern Family; by members of the middle, upper-middle, or professional classes such as Sonia Marks in The Odd Woman or Justin Stokes in The Finishing School; and by women from the rural or mountain classes like Wickie Lee Blount in A Mother and Two Daughters and Snow Mullins Quick, together with her Appalachian mountain relatives, in A Southern Family. Particularly in her fiction of the 1980s, Godwin is intent on showing the rejection or partial rejection of older aristocratic traditions by middle-class Southern women and men—as well as their efforts, which meet with only partial success, to establish connections with members of the rural class.

In A Mother and Two Daughters, for instance, grande dame Theodora Blount of Mountain City—Godwin's fictionalized version of Asheville—befriends the unwed, pregnant mountain girl Wickie Lee. Wickie Lee establishes herself financially by making exquisite little dolls, pulls herself up the social scale by contracting a successful marriage to a Mountain City widower, and, in a satisfying ironic stroke, is eventually revealed to be a distant relative of the snobbish Blount clan. In A Southern Family elegant Alicia Gallant befriends confused, unhappy Ralph Quick, a Mountain City man with a smattering of Cherokee Indian blood who is descended from an Appalachian family, and who is also Godwin's first partially sympathetic portrait of a character based upon her stepfather (she had earlier portrayed such a figure, much less favorably, as Ray Sparks in The Odd Woman). In A Southern Family Godwin explores the connections between the middle-class South and Appalachia through the marriage of Ralph's son Theo Quick to the young mountain woman Snow Mullins, examining these connections in detail after Theo's sudden suicide brings the Quick and Mullins families into contact. The relationship between the families enables Godwin to dwell upon the independence, self-sufficiency, and solidarity of the Mullins family and to emphasize—in a brilliant section of the novel narrated by Snow—the intelligence, shrewdness, self-sufficiency, and pride of Theo's widow, as well as the contempt Snow naturally feels for what she sees as the affectations and the overly refined manners of the Quick family. Such sections also enable Godwin to describe, in passages connecting nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern history, the "striking aesthetic deterioration" of the Appalachian landscape caused by sunbelt explosion resulting in careless deforestation and mining. Moreover, these sections indicate Godwin's informed historical awareness of Northern misunderstanding of the South, of ethnic prejudice, and of indigenous Southern sociocultural criticism:

The lumber mills had raped and pillaged, mining operations had heaped gigantic gray and yellow piles of the earth's innards along the road; new roads crisscrossed indiscriminately, trapping solitary old buildings, or parts of towns, in culs-desac; sleek modern brick-and-glass factories with turf lawns and nursery trees shared the same hills with tar-papered shacks and dirt yards. The people in the tar-papered shacks probably worked in the factories. Come South, said the old advertisements in Northeastern newspapers and trade journals, and take advantage of the "cheap and contented, 99 percent pure Anglo-Saxon labor." W. J. Cash had quoted such advertisements. And who had put them in those Northern papers? Who had invited the Yankee owners down, offering them inducements of free sites and tax exemptions? Impoverished Southerners who were too hungry to realize, or to care about, the irony: Yankees went to war with the South to free the enslaved blacks; then the conquered South invited them back to enslave the "cheap, contented, 99 percent pure Anglo-Saxons."

That Godwin in her fiction of the late 1980s is intent on depicting historic changes in American social patterns is shown by her emphasis upon racial tensions and interracial friendships in contemporary Southern settings. As in all her most substantial writing, the situations she portrays have a generational as well as a racial and social aspect. In A Mother and Two Daughters, for instance, she delineates important Southern social advances through a series of representative characters and actions. In the oldest generation portrayed in the novel, that of women and men in their sixties and seventies, she explores the intricacies of the racially inflected but deeply loving relationship of Theodora Blount and her long-time housekeeper Azalea—two old friends who by the end of the novel dress almost exactly alike, with Azalea wearing "a brooch Theodora had given her exactly as Theodora wore her brooch: pinned dead center in the decolletage."

In the second generation of A Mother and Two Daughters, represented by women and men in their thirties and forties, racial and social circumstances take a different, more serious, and also more heartening turn. Toward the end of the book, the Ku Klux Klan appears in Greensboro, and Klan members threaten the life of black television producer Calvin Edwards in Winston-Salem. These and similar incidents prompt one of the most interesting characters in the novel, Calvin's friend the sociology professor Renee Peverell-Watson—who is descended from a slave and an antebellum slaveholding minister—to enroll in law school in order to train herself to fight the growth of prejudice and racial injustice in the state. Stressing cultural progress, through deliberately symbolic literary procedures. Godwin shows how younger Southerners are breaking down traditional racial barriers by emphasizing the close bond between Renee and her white student Lydia, a housewife-turned-television-cook-show hostess, as well as the even closer ties between Lydia's son Leo and Renee's daughter Camilla, an elegant, accomplished young woman educated in England. In a long epilogue set five years after the main action of the novel, Godwin depicts the courtship and happy marriage of Leo and Camilla in an action designed to symbolize the ties among enlightened people of each race.

Reviewing Godwin's work, and also reviewing the issues explored in this essay, I believe several points need reemphasizing. Developments in theory and criticism during the last several decades have enabled scholars and readers to move beyond the strictures of the New Critics against autobiographical interpretations of literature and hence to explore in reasonably enlightened fashion the variegated, complex, and shifting relationships between an author's life and work. Such an approach seems particularly fruitful for investigations of the wellsprings of Godwin's writing. Like authors before her, Godwin appears to have mastered various technical aspects of her craft before she achieved a mature understanding or control of the autobiographical material underlying it. As her work has evolved, she has handled with growing dexterity the difficulties caused by her two broken marriages, her mother's remarriage, and her unhappy relationship with her stepfather—subjects that she explores with mature aesthetic rendition but not with mature understanding in such early books as The Perfectionists and The Odd Woman. She renders a thoughtful, sensitive reappraisal of the same subjects in the finely crafted, intricately constructed novel A Southern Family. As for the other issues considered in this essay, it seems clear that Godwin possesses a sensitive comprehension of the elements in Western, American, and Southern civilization that have affected and continue to affect Southern—as well as Western and American—class, race, and gender relationships. She understands and adroitly portrays the complications inherent in the interrelationships among several generations of family and community members as these interrelationships are influenced by the changes in late twentieth-century society, changes precipitated by the sunbelt explosion and, more generally, by the continuing rapid alterations in the social institutions that for millennia have characterized Western culture.

How these observations may finally be summarized in surveying Godwin's development as an author and the relationship, still imperfectly understood, between so-called popular writing and high, serious, or canonical writing runs more or less as follows. A reviewer whose name at present escapes me once remarked that popular and serious literature treat many of the same subjects, albeit in different manners necessitated by different markets and readers. Georg Lukacs, Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and other theorists who have investigated the similarities between popular and serious—or academically respectable, or institutionally canonized—writing would almost certainly agree. But as the beneficiaries of these and other theorists, and also as late twentieth-century students of various types of narrative, we do not need, I suspect, official assurance to convince us that the talented and productive Gail Godwin deserves a place in Southern and American literary canons.