Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf

Suzan Harrison

"The pleasures of reading," writes Eudora Welty, are "like those of a Christmas cake, a sweet devouring." Suzan Harrison here examines Welty's "devouring" of the works of Virginia Woolf and the ways in which Welty assimilates and transforms in each of her major novels the concerns she inherited from Woolf. Harrison avoids the implication of direct imitation. Rather, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the novel and his concept of dialogism, as well as various feminist theoretical perspectives, she describes Woolf's influence on Welty as a creative, awakening force that led to her own development as an artist. In each chapter, Harrison considers a pair of novels, one by Woolf and one by Welty, exploring the dialogues between the two works and illustrating a particular strategy used by these authors to appropriate and revise traditional masculine discourse. Most notable are their portrayal of women, experimentation with multivoiced narrative structures, incorporation of other genres into the context of their novels, and construction of new images of the female artist. To the Lighthouse, Delta Wedding, Orlando, The Robber Bridegroom, The Waves, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter - Harrison covers all these novels, tracing in those by Welty a maturing artistic vision and independence. By reading Eudora Welty in tandem with Virginia Woolf, Harrison locates Welty's fiction in the tradition of modernism and emphasizes Welty's interest in extending the boundaries of the novel as a genre - features of her work that are obscured by her categorization as a southern writer. Harrison succeeds in creating a new context - one of writers and literary trends outside the South - in which to read Welty's novels while also providing a new vantage point from which to regard Woolf's artistic achievement. Her book deserves the close attention of readers of Welty's and Woolf's fiction as well as scholars of feminist literary criticism, genre studies, and cultural studies.