Coaxing the Flower

摘要

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909 and although she was an enthusiastic, sophisticated and perceptive traveller, both within the USA and abroad, her home until her death in 2001 remained the house which her parents had had designedand built for them in the 1920s. She never married. A short-story writer and somewhat reluctant novelist (two of her four novels were in effect assemblages of linked short stories, the others expanded single ones), she was greatly honoured in the USA during her lifetime and is still revered, perhaps particularly (though she hated to be thought of as a regionalist) in the South. She has never, though, I suspect, been much read in Britain, despite Virago's brave 1980s mass market paperback publication ofher novels and the praise lavished on her, both in private and in print, by distinguished British admirers of her work such as E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, V. S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Taylor.