The Wide Net And Other Stories

by Eudora Welty

These eight stories reveal the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired writers. Set in the Old Natchez Trace region, the stories dip in and out of history and range from virgin wilderness to a bar in New Orleans. In each story, Miss Welty sustains the high level of performance that, throughout her distinguished career, has won her numerous literary awards. "Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time" (Time).

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Southern, Historical Fiction, Classics, Southern Gothic, Literary Fiction

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

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.

Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps this isn’t a five-star collection compared to others written by Welty, but compared to other collections written by other writers, it definitely is. Even though it’s only her second collection, Welty already displays a mastery of the form.

Here’s what I wrote of the collection after my first reading:
The Wide Net is another wonderful collection. Each story, except one (which is set in a bar in New Orleans), is set in and around the Natchez Trace, including a couple of very interesting ones with historical figures as characters (Aaron Burr in one, Audubon in another, as well as real lesser-knowns) and another (possibly my favorite) that uses Greek mythological elements and a Greek chorus for the contemporary story of the town "Queen," a Hera-like harridan. The final story is heartbreaking. (July 23, 2011)

I decided upon a second read as preparation for a recent trip along the Natchez Trace. During our hikes, I envisioned being in the areas Aaron Burr might have been—and was— (there’s a marker near a gully of the old Trace where he was arrested), as well as imagining Welty’s fictional meeting-place of nonfictional people: Audubon; Lorenzo Dow, a traveling preacher; and a horse thief and potential murderer named Murrell. A marker I discovered in a cypress/tupelo swamp indicated where the Pearl River once flowed and brought to my mind the antics of the young men in the title story.

Speaking of the title story, “the wide net” could describe Welty’s array of well-drawn, differentiated characters. Those adjectives also describe the individual stories themselves. Welty is not one to repeat herself in details or in writing styles.

I see that Welty is considered a folklorist; I would add she’s also a mythologist. Both roles are apparent in this work.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earlier I reviewed the title story (see below) before I had finished reading the entire collection. Now I have finished the eight stories and can say that the title story was a great indicator of the great pleasure that I would derive in reading the rest of the collection.
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I didn't rate this book of short stories because I just finished the second one, which happens to be the title story, "The Wide Net." It is about a young man who becomes angry with his pregnant wife and decides to go on an all-night toot. At least, that is what it ended up being. The next morning when he returns home his wife is not there.

"Then when he got back to the front room he saw she had left him a little letter in an envelope. That was doing something behind someone's back. He took out the letter, pushed it open, held it out at a distance from his eyes.... After one look he was scared to read the exact words, and he crushed the whole thing in his hand instantly, but what it had said was that she would not put up with him after that and was going to the river to drown herself.

"'Drown herself ... But she's in mortal fear of the water!'"

The young husband then begins to gather a group of people to help him drag the Pearl River for his wife. "The Wide Net" refers to one owned by a local doctor and since it is the widest possessed by anyone in the area, it is borrowed for the task.

Eudora Welty could write funny and she could write sad and sometimes she wrote both in the same story. Is "The Wide Net" comedy? or tragedy? or both? Not going to tell. However, here is an example of the lyricism of the word pictures with which she paints the landscape:

"In Dover it had rained, and the town looked somehow like new. The wavy heat of late afternoon came down from the watertank and fell over everything like shiny mosquito-netting. At the wide place where the road was paved and patched with tar, it seemed newly embedded with Coca-Cola tops. The old circus posters on the store were newly gone, only bits, the snowflakes of white horses, clinging to its side. Morning-glory vines started almost visibly to grow over the roofs and cling round the ties of the railroad track, where bluejays lighted on the rails, and umbrella chinaberry trees hung heavily over the whole town, dripping intermittently upon the tin roofs."

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

First Love - in a settler town the very tail of the Natchez Trace, a deaf-mute orphan Joel describes a series of meetings between Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhassett who hideout in his room; you need to know a little bit of history in order to enjoy this story. (3 stars)

The Wide Net - William Wallace Jamieson contemplates his young, pregnant wife's possible suicide by drowning; Hazel Jamieson left her husband a note blaming him for abandoning her by staying out all night drinking with his friends; William Wallace calls his friends for help (4 stars)

A Still Moment - a priest, a scientist and a murder meet on the road. (4 stars)

Asphodel - three old-maids have a picnic and they reminisce about Miss Sabina who had married Mr. Don McInnis, arranged by her father and told to "submit"; after Miss Sabina's husband cheated on her and her three children died just as they reached adulthood, Miss Sabina looked upon the town with hatred and wielded power over everything and everyone. (5 stars)

The Winds - Josie and her siblings are woken up by their parents in the middle of the night during a storm (4 stars)

The Purple Hat - a bartender, a casino employee and a heavily drinking customer are in a bar and discuss a middle age woman with a purple hat who gambles with younger men's money, they discuss her with the disgust appropriate for a woman of no great beauty, but a 'ghost' who still enjoys money and sex. (4 stars)

Livvie - Livvie married the much older Solomon and now he is on his deathbed (4 stars)

At the Landing - sheltered and protected by her rich grandfather, Jenny falls in love with Billy (4 stars)

[JimZ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this collection from The Modern Library edition that also included A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, her first collection of short stories. Regarding that collection, I thought overall they were superb. I cannot say the same about The Wide Net and Other Stories. I very much disliked these stories.

I know Eudora Welty’s skill as a writer along with her many awards and her establishment in the literary canon. I read with pleasure “What There is to Say, We Have Already Said,” a collection of letters written between her and William Maxwell, another accomplished writer. With that said, had I not known these stories were written by Eudora Welty, I would not have finished them.

There were 8 short stories to this collection. The stories were populated with very long sentences that were either meandering, overly descriptive, indecipherable to me, or a combination of “all of the above”. The only story that I understood was the title story, The Wide Net.

I’ll leave it at that. I am anxious to read the reviews of others and learn from them. Perhaps these stories have a certain style I am not used to reading…

[Larry Bassett · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I experience Eudora Welty, I know that there is much that I am missing. I continue to hope that one day I will be able to return to her books and award them with the star ratings that I am sure they must deserve. But today her short stories mostly remain a mystery to me.

The Wide Net and Other Stories was published in 1943. This book was read as a part of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. The setting for the stories is the Natchez Trace of Mississippi.

Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail: The Old Natchez Trace was a 500-mile footpath that ran through Choctaw and Chickasaw lands connecting Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee. You can experience portions of that journey the way earlier travelers did - on foot. Today there are four separate trails totaling 65 miles and they are administered by the Natchez Trace Parkway.
Source: http://www.nps.gov/natt/index.htm

The book of stories of the Natchez Trace begins with First Love. You cannot simply read this story with no background. At least I couldn’t. I tried and just couldn’t figure out what was going on. What did Aaron Burr have to do with Mississippi? Ask Google! Unless you have the information stored in your head, the research slows you down. The cadence of the lines is lost to the stop and start. There is a rhythm that almost begs to be read aloud to be experienced in full.

In reading, you will likely be reminded of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Clearly a Southern writer like them, Welty respects her often peculiar characters. She uses sly humor well, as in the title story The Wide Net where a bridegroom searching the river for his presumably drowned wife nonetheless is able to haul up a slew of fish to be sold on the streets of town. Each of her main characters is memorable, with the finely drawn quirkiness that stamps them as individuals.
http://www.amazon.com/Wide-Net-Other-...

Another story is The Purple Hat , a mere six pages long. And although I have no idea what it means, I know what happens and could tell you. So I will.

Two men come into a bar during a thunder storm and sit at opposite ends of the bar. One man, the talkative one, is fat. The other, the quiet one, is thin, young and unshaven. The only other person there is the bartender who serves them each a drink. The fat man launches into a story of a woman in a purple hat who has come into the Palace of Pleasure every day for thirty years and meets a young man there. The fat man allows as how she is a ghost and he has seen her murdered twice. The fat man tells the story of the murders. The cathedral bell chimes at 5 o’clock and the young, thin man gets up and leaves the bar having never said a word. The fat man shortly after pays the bar bill and also leaves the bar but not before he says he will be back tomorrow to continue the story.

The six pages are filled with descriptions, verbal and nonverbal interactions and mystery. And there you have it. No car chases. And, just like that, we are on to the next story. Another mystery of meaning that will have to wait until another day to be deciphered.

How do you read Eudora Welty? Her words seem magical at times, promising more than I can know. I will put her on the shelf with hope and expectation. Surely there is a way to understand her.

Or as someone else said some time ago:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

Or maybe: “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”

Source: A.A. Milne http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_...

[RJ - Slayer of Trolls]

Contains the stories:

First Love -
The Wide Net -
A Still Moment -
Asphodel -
The Winds -
The Purple Hat -
Livvie -
At the Landing -

[Susan Howson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was way more into this than A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and loved the Natchez Trace link between them all. "First Love" was my favorite -- what can I say, unexpected 18th century settings, featuring founding fathers, are my kryptonite. You could have worse kryptonites... like kryptonite.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The really interesting part of this book is Welty's narrative structure, which aligns each of the stories -- despite separate characters, forms and times -- along the historical Southern trade route called the Natchez Trace. Not all of the stories are truly mind-blowingly great, but the collection as a whole is important. Highlights for me are the title story, "First Love," and "A Still Moment."

[Isadora Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like Welty's more mythical and dreamy stories, you'll love A Wide Net. Some of the stories, such as "At the Landing," seem to bear some relation to the Natchez Trace and the imaginative world of The Robber Bridegroom, Welty's novella released the previous year (1942). Recommended.

[Scarlett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like these a little more than I did. I'm a big fan of the setting and I really appreciated the Natchez connection between all the stories but though a good number are very good, some of these felt a little dull. Perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind to read them, these are stories to take your time with, to appreciate detail and nuance and I might have rushed through some. Anyway, Welty is at her best when she's writing dialog and the title story is a great demonstration of that.

[Jena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never been so immersed in the worlds of an author's creation, as I am with the stories of Eudora Welty. Not only does she wrap you in the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of her characters' lives, she takes you into their hearts and minds as well. By the time you finish each story, you feel as if you've truly been somewhere, good or bad. These stories are incredibly rich in detail, sometimes joyous, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes utterly confusing, but all are masterpieces.

[Peter Lehu · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find these stories that memorable with the exception of the title story which is pretty great, thanks to hilarious dialogue, lots of action, and a touch of magical realism. The writing is well-crafted throughout but the characters don't do very much in most stories, nor do they have interesting interior lives besides being sheltered and lovesick. There is a Southern slowness and humidity to these stories but not much payoff for enduring it.

[Brendan Ryan]

The last bit of The Landing tore me to shreds

[Lauren Rhoades · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wide Net is Welty's second collection of stories. I've read her memoir One Writer's Beginnings, her Pulitzer prize winning Optimist's Daughter, and a few of her more well-known stories, but this was my first experience reading one of her full short story collections. My favorite story in this collection was the title story, in which a simple country man gathers up a rag tag team of other country guys to go looking for his missing pregnant wife. It's actually quite a funny story with characters that felt real enough to touch. The river, the animals, and trees are still fresh in my mind. Doc, the owner of the "wide net" has this little jewel of monologue:

"'Any day now the change will come. It's going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that's ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Come one of these nights and we can wander down here and tree a nice possum. Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow.' He went along rapping the tree trunks with his knuckle. 'Magnolia and live-oak never die. Remember that. Persimmons will all get fit to eat, and the nuts will be dropping like rain all through the woods here. And run, little quail run, for we'll be after you too" (48).

Can you get more Mississippi than that? Some of these stories I couldn't have understood without the benefit of Google. For example, "First Love" is the author's imagining story of Aaron Burr's clandestine meetings and subsequent capture and trial for treason near Natchez, Mississippi. "Asphodel" is heavy with Greek mythology, and "A Still Moment," is a chance meeting between John James Audubon, a preacher, and a bandit. Still some of these stories, I didn't completely grasp. They were dreamlike and just generally mystifying, full of vague signifiers, and possible allusions to sex and sexuality? I read these more for the the feeling that they invoked rather than trying to fully grasp the literal significance.

Welty's descriptions of nature are astounding, eerie, mystical. "Late at night the whole sky was lunar, like the surface of the moon brought as close as a cheek" (19). These are the kinds of unearthly images that will stay with me from this collection.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far only read The Wide Net. The story evokes a feeling of this is how it always goes, a matter-of-fact slice of reality. It documents and is a reality. The closest element of fiction may be the resplendent, maybe magic-realist imagery, but you experience this imagery through the characters, especially the addled mind of William Wallace. The story gently eases any expectation for drama with its hypnotic, deliberate pace, its indifference toward suspense.

It may be just as effective without dialogue, a silent film. The dialogue, though, complements this pace. Sometimes a sentence slips from a character's mouth and hangs, echoing, in the space of the page, eventually fading and swallowed by the Mississippi landscape.

When focusing on one character, you feel all the other characters present, somewhere. The story feels so present.

[Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even when a story doesn't quite lift it always instills a sense of nature, yearning and thoughtfulness. When Welty succeeds at connecting her characters, their desires and the appeal of nature, the work moves and feels the inside and the out until one is aware of something profound, forever distant and forever near.

[Julie Whelan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of short stories by Eudora Welty. They range from the rolicking title story to the surreal, other worldly story about a deaf boy's encounter with Aaron Burr to The Landing, a story about a young woman who gives her heart and everything she owns in unrequitted love

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short stories. Eudora Welty is one of my favorite authors. She draws a lot of her stories from her life experiences in Mississippi. Her sense of place is really powerful.

[Tinquerbelle]

Welty, Eudora
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

In compilation only.

1) First Love
2) The Wide Net
3) A Still Moment
4) Asphodel
5) The Winds
6) The Purple Hat
7) Livvie
8) At the Landing

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mouse-hole.” (from The Purple Hat)

Eudora Welty’s The Wide Net is a collection rooted in the winding rivers and buzzing landscapes of the Natchez area (near New Orleans). Welty’s stories are deeply tied to place through folklore, history, and the cultural specificities that make Southern life so rich.

In “First Love,” Welty explores an unexpected bond between a deaf-mute boy and a woman marooned in her own circumstances, against the backdrop of a historic judicial case. “The Winds” delivers a mix of humor and suspense, with townspeople bracing for an unpredictable storm. It’s a scene of comical preparedness, but also a reminder of how deeply nature is embedded in the community’s daily pulse. “Livvie,” one of the most compelling stories, centers on a young Black woman who stands at a crossroads between her duty to a dying husband and the possibility of new beginnings with a stranger. It’s a story of transformation—personal, spiritual, and seasonal.

Throughout the collection, musical instruments frequently appear: cornets (trumpets), fiddles, banjos and pianos mark moments of change, education, and even revelation. They aren’t just background noise but seem to represent something bigger—a sense of hope, transition, or even a reach toward something greater than oneself.

Reading The Wide Net makes me dream of moving to a small town, somewhere rich with history and mystery—but then I remember that comes with fewer bookstores and a smaller library.

[KayG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Welty knew her south. Her writing is so wonderfully descriptive. My favorite was First Love. Her description of the deaf boy seeing voices in breaths in the frigid air - that is what makes reading worthwhile.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

While still struggling to acknowledge Welty as "one of the greats" this second collection of her stories I have read recently does have some strong stories to be recognized. In this group of stories Welty has written a few that are the most unique I have read.

In the opening story, entitled "First Love", we see a young boy, employed as a boot blacker at a hotel on the Western frontier circa 1800. We know this is the time frame as the boy has nightly visions, dreams or real he never quite knows, where he observes the treasonous Aaron Burr in stealthy meetings in the middle of the night. The voice of this story is very odd but it works on every level. An excellent story.

The Purple Hat and Livvie are both interesting stories. The former is a one scene story where a man recollects to a stranger stories of an older woman with a purple hat who entices and entrances young men only to discard them when she achieves her goal. In Livvie we see a young woman married to a septuagenarian and as he approaches death embracing what that might mean for her.

The stories that are most to be remembered however are the title story and then the longer story, a novella really, called " At the Landing." In the former a young husband, living in an isolated area with his wife returns home to no sign of her. He visits an older neighbor, a gentleman who not only owns "The Wide Net" but considers himself an expert in the science of river dragging. We view the process of dragging the river, meet the characters who take part, and then view the surprise ending.

In the final story we meet a young woman being raised by her grandfather. The man has kept her to a very sheltered existence but now as he approaches his death the young lady is going to see her life change. She meets a man, one who works on her grandfather's farm. The village, The Landing, suffers a catastrophic flood. The young man rescues the girl but in the process changes her life, her future. A special note on this story is one should be prepared for the ending. Welty, without being too explicit, writes about an event that I have never seen written about previously in the literature of that time. If nothing else she was a brave writer, trying to embrace her culture and shine a light on it at the same time.

[Vel Veeter]

This is an ok collection. The star appeal I felt when I read A Curtain of Green was just not here. It’s strange because this collection came out only about a year after that one, and it strikes me as so obvious to only publish most of both collections or just combine them together, because a lot of these stories were pretty unforgettable. Eudora Welty (I have typed that as Wlety about 1000 times in my lifetime from back in my college days when I wrote a long term paper on her novel The Optimist’s Daughter – End digression) still remains a soft-hearted version of Flannery O’Connor in that her characters are often larger than life, but they aren’t grotesque masques of humanity.

The best story in this collection by far is the title story. In this story, a man gets tired of his pregnant wife and stays out drinking all night. When he gets home she is gone, having a left a note that she has jumped in the river. The resulting story involves dragging the river with, get this, a wide net. It’s good. Here’s how it opens: “William Wallace Jamieson’s wife Hazel was going to have a baby. But this was October, and it was six months away, and she acted exactly as though it would be tomorrow.”



I am challenged by my feelings about Welty (got it that time) because I have read a few of her books and I try really hard to like her. And I have a few times. I really liked The Optimist’s Daughter. I think I must have convinced myself that I am the type of person who likes Welty and can’t handle the fact that maybe I am not.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed these stories a good deal more than the first collection, A Curtain of Green. Favorites: The Wide Net, Asphodel, Livvie, and A Still Moment.

[Iulia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read as part of The Collected Stories.
As solid as Welty's writing can be, I think it's impossible to understand and ultimately enjoy the stories in this collection without some sort of background knowledge, for they are not what they seem (in most cases). I didn't have that background knowledge and therefore can honestly say that the deeper meaning of these stories went over my head, and despite my best intentions I was unable to unpack some underlying themes or read between the lines at all times. Is this a sign of great literature, the fact that is so specifically localized? So maybe 'it's not the book, it's me' kind of thing, but it's hard for an outsider belonging to a different time and a different place to appreciate what Welty is trying to say here.
My favourites from this collection were Livvie and At the Landing.

[Sarah]

Oh, Alright! I'm not going to finish this. I was never going to finish this.

I don't know if it's the history lesson, the writing style, the lack of sensuality, or the larger-than-usual print, but this felt very much like an elementary school reading text book.

Don't get me wrong. Endora Welty is good at what she does. Some of her descriptions are quite lovely. It's just, I was very aware I was reading a book. That's all I'm saying!

[Dianne Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

perhaps one must be southern to appreciate her?

[Yuliya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I felt differently, but just not for me. Descriptive writing has its fans. I just felt lost in a stream of images that meant nothing to me.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was not for me.

[Graham Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

"First Love" was amazing, rest didn't hit the notes.