Friendship and Sympathy
Communities of Southern Women Writers
Includes pieces by Lisa Alther, Doris Betts, Ellen Douglas, Kaye Gibbons, Gail Godwin, Caroline Gordon, Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty
This anthology reveals the pattern of friendship and sustaining encouragement that unites many of the most distinguished women authors of the American South.
Included here are essays, reviews, and appreciations that express the reciprocal admiration, the encouragement, the beneficial influence, and the tutelage that nurtured them and fostered their careers.
In showing the interweaving of the social and artistic relations between these writers, this collection makes a consequential revelation that will enrich southern literary history.
This collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and interviews details the interaction among a number of southwestern women writers, including Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Josephine Humphreys. Occupation, gender, and region conspire to join these authors in kinship, and, like family members, they offer criticism, support, admiration, and understanding to one another. This anthology will be useful both in the college classroom and for the general reader. It is sure to enlighten, entertain, inspire, and delight.
Rosemary M. Magee is associate dean of Emory College and is editor of Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, published by University Press of Mississippi.