[In the following review, the critic notes the strength of Porter's technical skill and offers brief assessments of each of the short stories in Flowering Judas.]

Katherine Anne Porter is of that youngest generation of American artists from which one dares hope much. The generation—called "our own generation" by Malcolm Cowley, who is 33 years of age—includes Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Glenway Wescott, Yvor Winters and Kenneth Burke. What distinguishes this group from older groups in American letters—the groups that included Dreiser, Anderson and others—is its working practice of putting nothing creative forward until it has been weighed and polished and given the benefit of a hundred second thoughts. This may be evidence, carefully hidden under the fetish of "discipline," of a lack of creative vitality; but, in any event, it has resulted in a small body of work that is technically perfect. Four of the six stories in Flowering Judas are additions to this body of work; they are carefully wrought, devoid of clichés, distinguished for their technical originality. And behind these four stories there is power to feel, a power that is kept always under control. The ardor-in leash of "Maria Concepción," "Rope," "He" and "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," imparts to the stories an intensity that is lacking in much fiction that, superficially, seems more emotional.

One of the stories, "Rope," is wrought out of a simple enough situation. It concerns a period of emotional tension between husband and wife. The wife has a case of "nerves"; she blows up when the husband brings home a useless strand of rope from the village store. The husband has forgotten the coffee; and the piece of rope stands as symbol to the wife of all that she must endure in selfishness and forgetfulness on the part of the male. To the husband, the rope signifies the freedom, the carelessness, that marriage has inevitably curtailed. There is nothing unusual about this situation, but Miss Porter focuses it in an unforgettable way. Her knowledge of the psychology of the situation is uncanny and she brings it out by putting the entire story in indirect discourse. Instead of actual conversation one gets the overtones of conversation. This is far more important than the reporting of speech could possibly be, for we get a series of insinuations, of implications, a sense of things left unsaid, that actual dialogue could not bring out.

Two of the stories, "Maria Concepción" and "Flowering Judas," are set in Mexico. They mirror—the first more than the second—a cruelly ardent vision of life that one likes to think of as Mexican. Certainly one gained a similar idea of Mexican character from the stories of D.H. Lawrence. But whatever their spiritual truth, they are distinguished by a scrupulous distinction of phrase. Maria Concepción, for example, walks away from a glimpse of her husband's infidelity with "her ears strumming as if all Maria Rosa's bees had hived in them." When the husband and Maria Rosa leave the village for war, it is to enter a theatre of battle that eventually "unrolled itself, a long scroll of vexations, until the end had frayed out within twenty miles of Juan's village."

"Flowering Judas" is less successful than "Maria Concepción." It fails because at the end it slips into a dream symbolism that is confused, and the result—which may be the fault of the reader's insensitiveness—is that we get only a confused sense of what the woman, Laura, is like. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" slips in and out of a dream state with far more convincing reality. In this story, through the distortions and confusions of a dying woman's mind, we get a knowledge of a superb old lady who has lived imperiously and nobly. "He" tells the story of the effect of an imbecile son upon a family. It escapes sentimentality by reason of its careful objectivity. The only bad story in Flowering Judas is "Magic," which is simply a five-finger exercise on Miss Porter's part.