Optimist's Daughter

by
Eudora Welty

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Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

3.44 of 5 stars 3.44 · rating details · 3,598 ratings · 460 reviews

This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Audio Cassette, Abridged

Published April 12th 1987 by Random House, Inc. (first published January 1st 1972)

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Aug 17, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jeffrey by: On the Southern Literary Trail

"Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams."

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1973. It was written much later than the bulk of the rest of her work. She had, as it turned out, one more little gem left in her pen. I've read some other reviews and realize that the book was confusing to some people even to the point that they gave up relatively...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Madeleine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: head-in-the-clouds-nose-in-a-book, our-libeary, maybe-it-s-time-to-live, mmxiii

While I do tend to take my sweet time moseying toward a review after finishing a book, stewing both over and in my thoughts for often days at a time before taking the perfectionist's route to laboring over my words (or slapping some observations together to see what sticks and hoping that no one points out the crooked seams or varicolored threads), trying to sort and figure out what I want to say about The Optimist's Daughter was an especially difficult task. It wasn't until Mark -- who is often...more While I do tend to take my sweet time moseying toward a review after finishing a book, stewing both over and in my thoughts for often days at a time before taking the perfectionist's route to laboring over my words (or slapping some observations together to see what sticks and hoping that no one points out the crooked seams or varicolored threads), trying to sort and figure out what I want to say about The Optimist's Daughter was an especially difficult task. It wasn't until Mark -- who is often exactly what I need to pry a sticky thought loose from the place where things elude elucidation (thanks, Mark!) -- left a comment on the in-progress version of this review that I saw where the difficulties lie. The problem was not, as I mistakenly believed at first, the unfortunate truth that it is mighty hard talking about a much-loved book beyond HOLY MOTHER OF BACONATOR, THIS BOOK ROCKED MY FACE OFF: It's that I've been trying to use my head to approach a book that I felt almost entirely in my heart. (And also that I suffer from a paralyzing fear of sounding corny in a public forum, which made the immediately preceding confession hard to even consider typing.)

So let me try to establish where I was emotionally during most of my time reading The Optimist's Daughter. I recently spent an evening with my little brother, his girlfriend and some other fine folks in celebration of my future sister-in-law turning 21 (as I spent my 21st birthday starting and finishing a 20-page final paper and then moving out of my dorm room for the summer, I embraced the opportunity to properly observe a milestone event that I never thought I'd help a loved one usher in again). My brother has more beef with our parents than I do (to the tune of $40K of debt that they fraudulently and unconscionably thrust upon him before he finally moved out, but that's another story for another review), so we invariably vent about our deplorable origins whenever we're together. But this was a happy occasion that called for minimum mutual griping -- and, while Little Bro's girlfriend is well-versed in just how deeply fucked up our parents are and understands our need for the sporadic bitch session, I tend to clam up about such things around her, as her much more loving mother died when she was 14, leaving FSIL at the mercy of both a father and step-father who did not treat her at all like her good-hearted self deserves.

Later, since hubs and I live tantalizingly close to a bar, we made a midnight sojourn to the local watering hole on our way home because, hey, why not go all the way and keep drinking? As I've demonstrated many times before, I'm at a point where I'm pretty comfortable talking about life as a self-appointed orphan; my husband knows this better than anyone else but is still reluctant to broach the topic unless I lead the way (or, you know, we receive another letter from a collection agency about my mother's mounting debt -- which, objectively, I find hilarious considering that not speaking to the horrid shrew in three years means that I never gave her my new address, which she is somehow using to apply for things). But, even in the wake of listening to my brother and me swap grievances about our lousy parents, it wasn't 'til after a few lips-loosening rounds that hubs asked if the wound of severing all ties with my family still hurts. But, really, you can't miss what you never had and you can't hurt where there's no feeling left. I didn't grow up with a fraction of the love I now feel when I spend the holidays or a just-because afternoon with my husband's family, nuclear or extended. And, through the five-Guinness-deep fog I'd worked myself into, I was blindsided by the stone-cold-sober realization what does sting is how all my brother and his girlfriend have is themselves, me, and their friends. And, yeah, they both seem pretty happy with the way things are but that doesn't stop me from feeling terrible on their behalf. Because I've at least been blessed with a second chance at finding out what a close-knit family feels like, to have in-laws who regard me as the daughter they've always wanted and with a parental warmth I've never known. And it kills me that I can't help two of the people I love and want to protect the most fill what has to be a similarly shaped and long-empty void.

It was with that mindset (and self-inflicted guilt, because that's where I'm a viking) I approached a considerable chunk of Eudora Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning gem of a novel. Laurel, the 40-some-year-old widow who has watched her mother die years before and now stands helplessly aside as her father gives himself up to his age, is left with her young stepmother, hometown friends and neighbors, and a house filled with memories as she grapples with making sense of life without a safety net of unconditional love.

Please do not misunderstand: This is not one of those novels that is eking by on bland mawkishness alone. The writing is sublime. I have spent so much time entrenched in the long-held belief that anyone who opted for five words when twice as many could be deployed just as easily is guilty of not trying hard enough. Discovering Raymond Carver has been instrumental in changing my tune, though the impact of this book alone would have been enough to silence the mulishly stubborn biases of my youth. Welty rivals Carver when it comes to packing a brutalizing force in just enough detail to act as a guiding light through the narrative but leaving so much left unsaid so that the reader is left to contemplate the implications while affixing his or her own personal relevancies to deliver the intended blow of dawning clarity. There is so much power in Welty'a words but it's her silent symbols that convey the most involuble truths. The sadness and loss bursting from both the spoken and un- very nearly had this novel thrumming with compounded grief that needed an outlet before the pages themselves imploded with unexpressed emotions.

That outlet is Laurel's histrionic, selfish and utterly unlikeable stepmother, Fay -- who reminded me so much of my mother that I couldn't help but pound this book that I loved against whatever surface closest to me in achingly frustrated empathy for Laurel. While Laurel is reacquainting herself with her parents as individuals whose context is purely historical and complete now, understanding their place in her life and their significance to each other, coming to the kind of epiphany that is the only preface to closure, Fay runs off with her equally insufferable family as if the death of a spouse is the kind of thing one gets over with a carelessly impoverishing shopping binge and a pedicure. The final run-in between the two unsettlingly close-in-age (but light years apart in maturity, ye gods) women does make for a clunky delivery of a message that Welty implied so well that she certainty didn't need her main character to verbalize it. But their confrontation is so satisfying. It worked for me because grief and loss are not tidy processes. And it also served as long-awaited proof that I can still be positively smitten with a book despite a fist-clenchingly hateful character's prominent role in it.

Even with an ending that seems to mar an otherwise flawless reading experience for so many others, The Optimist's Daughter is beautiful and human and sings of what great writing can do when a great writer is firing on all cylinders. But it is a book that I just could not approach academically. It deserves to be savored and marveled at and its sharp edges absolutely should leave a few cuts and reopened wounds in its aftermath. It is a book that should, above all, be felt to be fully appreciated.(less)

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Apr 03, 2013 Melki rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: family-based-fiction

It's not easy becoming an orphan at any age. Suddenly, your safety net is gone. You are adrift. And no one will ever call you "son" or "daughter" again.

Just like me, Laurel was a middle-aged woman when she was orphaned. Unlike me, Laurel had to cope not only with the death of her father, but the persistent and annoying presence of her "evil" new stepmother, Fay.

Just how awful is Fay? As pesky as a gnat and as prone to tantrums as a spoiled child, she is undoubtedly irritating. Nothing passes wi...more It's not easy becoming an orphan at any age. Suddenly, your safety net is gone. You are adrift. And no one will ever call you "son" or "daughter" again.

Just like me, Laurel was a middle-aged woman when she was orphaned. Unlike me, Laurel had to cope not only with the death of her father, but the persistent and annoying presence of her "evil" new stepmother, Fay.

Just how awful is Fay? As pesky as a gnat and as prone to tantrums as a spoiled child, she is undoubtedly irritating. Nothing passes without Fay having to comment on it, and as Welty explains - Her flattery and disparagement sounded just alike. When her husband, Judge McKelva is diagnosed with a slipped retina, she declares, "I don't see why this had to happen to me." Annoying as Fay is, she's a great character, and the book could not exist without her. Her embarrassment over the arrival of her white trash relatives from Texas, the relatives she claimed were dead, was almost touching.

Why on earth did Judge Mac marry this woman? Well, he was an optimist...

But, Laurel, of course, carries the soul of the book in her sensible heart. Her return home for the funeral leaves her steeped in memories of her beloved mother. She seems astonishingly accepting of the fact that the horrid Fay has been left the house and all of its possessions. I doubt that I would remain as calm under such circumstances.

Laurel is certainly not as attached to "things" as I am. As she unsentimentally dusts her father's library for the last time, my heart was breaking. I wanted her to pack the whole thing up and take it with her. But Laurel is wise. She realizes that in the end, we are left with nothing but fond memories of things that used to be, and people that have passed through our lives, touching us in ways that will never be forgotten.

Who needs things when you have a memory like this one:

When Laurel was a child, in this room and in this bed where she lay now, she closed her eyes like this and the rhythmic, nighttime sound of the two beloved reading voices came rising in turn up the stairs, every night to reach her. She could hardly fall asleep, she tried to keep awake, for pleasure. She cared for her own books, but she cared more for theirs, which meant their voices. In the lateness of the night, their two voices reading to each other where she could hear them, never letting a silence divide or interrupt them, combined into one unceasing voice and wrapped her around as she listened, as still as if she were asleep. She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

(less)

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Aug 12, 2012 Thing Two rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Thing Two by: Southern Lit Book Club

Shelves: nba-nominee, pulitzer-prizes-winner, books-you-might-have-missed, book-club-goodreads-southern-lit

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22...

This short novel won Eudora Welty a Pulitzer in 1972. The Optimist's Daughter is the tale of Laurel McKelva, a middle-aged widower living in Chicago, called to New Orleans to be with her ailing father the Judge. After the Judge passes - one doesn't say dies in the South - Laurel and her step-mother, the younger and self-centered Wanda Fay, return to the family home in Mississippi to bury the Judge.

This is the extent of the plot. Nothing much happens beyon...more

5 likes · like · see review

Aug 03, 2012 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, death, family, fathers-and-daughters, grief, love, loss, marriage, mothers-and-daughters, pulitzer-prize-winner, memory, southern-class-and-culture, southern-literature, time-and-memory, eudora-welty, 2012, mississippi

The Optimist's Daughter: Eudora Welty's Celebration of Life and Memory

"But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all."--Laurel McKelva Hand

It is bittersweet to write about this little gem. It comes with no frills, no literary allusions, no photographs.

My mother died on February 1, 2012. She gave me...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: welty, pulitzer-fiction

In returning home to be with her sick father, Welty writes a story of relationships: Laurel and her dad; Laurel and her dad's new self-centered, Texan wife, Fay. After the eye surgery, her father dies and after the funeral Laurel spends 3 days alone in her childhood home. In deep reflection, she focuses on her losses -- her father, her mother, and the early death of her husband, Phil. "The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne. . . Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of...more

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Aug 24, 2007 Lauren rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A perfect novel about family, hometowns, the grip of memory, and the dignity of living with sadness. So quietly and eloquently written and brutally full of heart.

9 likes · like · see review

Apr 16, 2013 Oscar rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mainstream, míos, drama

Laurel viaja precipitadamente para estar junto a su padre, el juez McKelva, cuando éste la llama. Está preocupado por su salud, algo le pasa a uno de sus ojos. Hacía tiempo que no se encontraba con su padre, concretamente desde su boda con Fay, su madrastra, una mujer más joven que ella, orgullosa e insoportable. Los hechos se precipitan y Laurel se verá obligada a volver a su pueblo natal, Mount Salus, Mississippi, volver no sólo físicamente sino también con su memoria. Laurel deberá hacer fren...more

1 like · like · see review

Dec 27, 2008 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just finished this. I feel like I need a bit to digest what I read (I read it in a day). My family is from Mississippi and any topic related to that state is near and dear to my heart.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this story and I worry that any review or recommendation I give will sound juvenile to the extreme. At times, I did not understand Laurel; I didn't know how to take her. Fay I hated from the beginning as she is easy to dismiss, shallow and immature even for being all of 40....more

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Nov 12, 2012 Morgan Golladay rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a classic example of Welty at her finest. Many Southern writers fall into the trap of wallowing in that peculiar institution, "Southern Melancholia." Welty gives us a snapshot of a family caught in the throes of their own self-absorption, and she skillfully navigates us through the maze of their inter-personal relationships, but avoiding the over-sentimentality that could so easily take over the novel.

Laurel McKelva Hand has returned to her Mississippi birthplace to care for her father,...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My third Pulitizer read in close succession and am definitely seeing a trend in prize winners. Welty's language is clear and concise, especially her artful rendering of Fay (as annoying and awful as she is). For example, how does Welty manage, in one paragraph of dialogue, to SHOW us Fay is lying about her family history? I don't know, but she does and this simplicity can deceive the reader into thinking this book is less crafted than it is. There were a number of times when a line would bring m...more

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May 07, 2012 Ket Lamb rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Optimist's Daughter is a subtle, old-fashioned novel set in the South that explores social class, death, and values through the conflict between the middle-aged, widowed, well-bred daughter of a judge, Laurel, and her ignorant, red necked, younger stepmother, Fay. Once the judge dies under questionable circumstances, the old world - Laurel and her bridesmaids - try to fend off the encroaching new one - Fay, and her hayseed relatives. Yet, the past keeps rearing it's disturbing head. As Eudor...more

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Apr 14, 2012 Demisty Bellinger rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Laurel McKelva Hand, an only daughter, rushes home to the South from Chicago because her father, Judge McKelva, told her he was going in for eye problems. His wife's illnesses begin similarly which eventually led to her death. He learns that his retina has slipped, which requires an operation and a recovery that requires stillness. His young wife, Fay, is against the operation and internalizes the suffering to be her own—something happening to her—not the judge's.

Eventually, the judge dies, and...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Heather Fowler rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Welty's novel has spunk. Horrified by the new wife's character at the beginning of a narrative that seems built around an old man dying, my initial impression was that this book would be an ensemble cast narrative of a specific Southern community and somewhat comic but lightweight reading. The structure, however, changes as the book continues. From a narrative rife with dialogue, there is a deepening of the layers during the later passages about the optimist's daughter and much prose that delica...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Barbara rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classic, realistic-fiction

Though this isn't historical fiction, The Optimist's Daughter transports the reader back to a Mississippi town in the mid-twentieth century where social class stratifies the society and dictates behavior. Laurel, the daughter of a small town judge, has returned from Chicago to her family home because her father needs surgery for his eyes. The situation is complex because similar surgery caused the loss of her mother's vision and began a long decline ending with her death a few years before. Her...more

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Nov 15, 2010 Mary Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 10, 2010 Kendall rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just finished reading Welty's Optimist Daughter for the 2010 Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. Welty never ceases to amaze with her dark and subtle look into Southern culture. The main character Laurel faces dilemmas and competing loyalties after the death of her father, as she reflects on the deaths of her mother and husband before him. Each shows her a different perspective on life, from which she must choose. Both parents have had vision problems (cataracts) and eye surgery, prior to, though...more

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Jun 18, 2010 Terry rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I loved this. It moved from a comedy of manners to a meditation on life and death and our desire and our ancestors' desire to make contact. It reminded me quite a bit of Joyce's "The Dead" so... take that the way it means something to you.

Two thoughts--one related to the book, one not, really. One: it's strange to read, to participate in, Southern literature without being aware of Southern history. There's always a twinge, there. It's like unraveling Faulkner's moodiness--the despair and regret...more

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Nov 03, 2009 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“Wings beat again. Flying in from over the mountain, over the roof and a child’s head, high up in blue air, pigeons had formed a cluster and twinkled as one body. Like a great sheet of cloth whipping in a wind of its own making, they were about her ears. They came down to her feet and walked on the mountain. Laurel was afraid of them, but she had been provided with biscuits from the table to feed them with. They walked about, opalescent and solid, on worm-pink feet, each bird marked a little dif...more

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Feb 03, 2009 Bethany rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

4.5 stars. This is a book about loss, the mystery of family, and how we compartmentalize our lives, and our suffering. It's about the power of memory, about death, and about letting go. It's about the ability even those closest to us have to surprise us. Or, better stated, about how we're only given the merest fraction of one another to ponder. How much we hoard ourselves from one another, afraid to be too well understood. It's about what's necessary to survive - a second wife, a slate wiped cle...more

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Feb 06, 2008 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The first three-quarters amazed and delighted me. That is not a criticism of the final quarter. Rather, it's an admission that the shift in tone led to a place I felt less comfortable. Welty is just an astonishing writer. Her Mississippians are drawn so specifically and so authentically, and the way she differentiates them from the Texan characters is perfect. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, which is no surprise. I've had it on my shelf for years. I'm very happy I finally read it.

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Aug 04, 2012 Everitt rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, american-literature, nostalgia-lit, southern-literature

3.5/5

This is less a review than a running collection of my thoughts as recorded in an experimental thread for "The Southern Literary Trail" group.

Part I

Laurel seems like she's got a lot to learn about her father and perhaps mother. I'm wondering whether Fay will be the conduit for that learning. The contentious relationship that exists right now seems to have the seeds of a much deeper experience. I think perhaps Welty has created a kind of bildungsroman around Laurel. Though she's a worldly wom...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Vivian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 28, 2011 Knitography rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, fiction-other

This was a challenging book to read, in part due to the subject matter and in part due to the writing style; the story unfolds slowly, and there are no grand moments or revelations. This is a nuanced study of death and at the subtleties of human relationships.

The book gave me a lot to think about, but in the end I found it ultimatley unsatisfying. None of the characters in the book really won my empathy or interest, likely because apart from Laurel they were all quite one-dimensional - essential...more

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Feb 28, 2009 Gracie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I must be missing something, as it's won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has numerous sparkling reviews, but I did not enjoy this book at all. At only 180 pages, this book was still a struggle for me to get through. The narrative was both vague and tedious. The storyline seemed disjointed and at times defied belief. I failed to find the meaning in the blatantly meant-to-be-symbolic events, such as the home invasion by a chimney swift.

Additionally, I felt the characters grossly underdeveloped....more

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Oct 16, 2011 Amanda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-reads

Not terrible. Not great or amazing though either. Literally a weekend book. In fact depending on your speed you could finish this is in a day.

Young woman meets her father and step mother who is only 40 years old, which makes her younger than herself, in New Orleans to find out her father is losing his eye sight similar to the way her mother also lost hers years before. She returns to her childhood home with her step mother and her father in a coffin due to his death after surgery. Not sure exact...more

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Sep 13, 2010 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The saddest book I’ve ever read.

The Optimist’s Daughter, Laurel, comes back to Mississippi for her convalescing father who subsequently dies. At seventy, he had married a much younger woman, Fay, from Texas. Laurel’s bridesmaids, the local spinsters, pull off the funeral and Fay and Laurel eventually square off.

The book is about the lives we led and the choices we make and the consequences of same. In death, we get a final, clear look at how our parents lived and what they were like. The followi...more

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Oct 14, 2011 Vasha7 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The year before Eudora Welty began writing this book, her mother and last remaining brother died (her other brother had died six years previously). Before that, Welty had spent years caring for her mother in declining health, and their relationship had always been difficult and guilt-laden. The Optimist's Daughter is an anguished novel. But although it's personal, it's not literally autobiographical. The events of the life of its protagonist, Laurel McKelva Hand, are not those of the author's li...more The year before Eudora Welty began writing this book, her mother and last remaining brother died (her other brother had died six years previously). Before that, Welty had spent years caring for her mother in declining health, and their relationship had always been difficult and guilt-laden. The Optimist's Daughter is an anguished novel. But although it's personal, it's not literally autobiographical. The events of the life of its protagonist, Laurel McKelva Hand, are not those of the author's life. Welty wrote only her emotions into the story, which spans the illness, death, and funeral of Laurel's father Judge McKelva.

The author chose to set off her reflections on family love, on the relation between Laurel's father and her late mother Becky, on memory, and on lasting value, by creating a character that was the complete antithesis of everything she valued: Fay Chisom, whom the Judge had married just two years before his death. Brash, utterly self-centered, caring only about the present moment, apparently incapable of love, insensitive to the worth of carefully-made objects, her only idea of beauty what's brightest and showiest, Fay despoils Laurel's family house, mistreats the Judge, and insults the memory of everything Laurel has loved. She symbolizes, too, the erasure of connection to the past in Mississippi society, like the new interstate that now roars past the cemetery. Welty commented that she "hated" Fay, which is unusual in her humane writings, saying, "She's the one who doesn't understand what experience means and doesn't learn anything. And to me, that is horrifying and even evil, almost sinful. And I may have gone overboard in that case. I have been accused of it." It is difficult for a character created as a foil to live independently, though the introduction of Fay's family does go some way toward making her more rounded.

In the end, Laurel will realize that she's better off than Fay because she can remember and be hurt; memory is its own thing that doesn't depend on physical connection to the past, and if it's painful that's proof that it's still alive. The book contains loving recollections of Laurel's parents while her mother was alive (but also her mother's painful final years when the Judge failed her by being an "optimist" who could not acknowledge the seriousness of her unrelievable distress), and of Laurel's brief marriage before her husband was killed in WWII. These, like all passages devoted to Laurel's interior thoughts, are written in a highly literary prose a million miles from the vernacular monologue of The Ponder Heart . It's all very finely calculated writing, though a bit chilly, perhaps. This novel is best suited to someone willing to turn the pages slowly, to digest it like a subtle short story. I can imagine myself returning to it when I'm old, and perhaps then feeling the full impact of a work that currently leaves me rather cold.(less)

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Mar 10, 2012 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

3.5 Who thought you could get three different books into the span of 180 pages? Although I was interested in the story and Laurel's character (she is a complicated and a little hard to figure out), I just couldn't really get into the book. The first part of the book is about her father's dying and is told in a completely different way than his funeral or her time in the house after the funeral. The last third of the book felt kind of awkward as she tries to deal with her memories of her mother a...more

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Mar 23, 2009 Maggie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Although this book is told through an omniscent author, Laurel's view is so strong that it feels as if it were written in first person.

Laurel is a widow and the only child of Judge McKelva, a small-town Mississippi lawyer, who has remarried after the death of his beloved wife. Faye is the new wife and she is nearly the same age as Laurel but, as becomes clear during the book, the two women have nothing in common and are total strangers to each other.

The town, the characters, and their pasts ar...more

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About Eudora Welty

Eudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.

Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a sig...more Eudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.

Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.

During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.

Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.

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Quotes from The Optimist's Daughter

“The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.” — 9 people liked it

“Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?” — 7 people liked it

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