VMC
3 primary works
Book 346
These extraordinary stories are sweet and melancholic divulging the minor tragedies of people with an original and black humour. The stories are full of weird and wonderful characters - deaf mutes, bigamists, spinsters, hairdressers and jazz players. She captures the casual absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her native south characters with a sympathetic and subtle humour. A truly wonderful collection.
Book 410
Edna Earle's Uncle Daniel Ponder is quite a character in the town of Clay, Mississippi: he carries a Stetson, dresses fit to kill in a snow white suit and is as good as gold - everyone will admit that. But the trouble with Uncle Ponder is he's as rich, as Croesus and a great deal too generous. He gave Edna Earle a hotel, and once he even tried to give away his own lot in a cemetery. But when his first marriage to Miss 'Teacake' Magee didn't work out, he needed someone else to give things to. So he married seventeen -year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock from a poor backwoods family who 'could cut hair and looked as though a good gust of wind might carry her off'. She was carried off, but not by the wind - and the result, related in Edna Earle's rattling tongue, is a masterpiece of comic absurdity:
Book 422
In the midst of the Mississippi woods, pretty young Rosamond Musgrove lives with her father, Clement, and her chilly, jealous stepmother, Salome. There, she is loved by her father but treated badly by his wife, never able to please however little she complains. One day, she is instructed to clean the house from top to toe, to wash the floor, polish the dishes and shine the candlesticks until they gleam and glitter in the darkness. That evening, worn out and dishevelled, she meets for the first time the dashing bandit, Jamie Lockhart, and from then on, her fate is sealed ...In this extraordinary , colourful fairy tale of the South, Eudora Welty clearly displays her admiration of the old tradition and combines it with her perceptive and curious sense of the place and people she loves.