Eudora Welty is the liveliest critical introduction yet to the work of this Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and the first feminist approach to the whole body of her work. Long respected as one of William Faulkner's heirs in the South, Welty is now coming into her own as a versatile prose stylist and story-teller who introduces a new feminine vision in American literature to challenge the traditional masculine emphasis upon solitary, agonistic heroism and escape from civilisation in violent adventure. This study of her work provides the most complete biography to date, places Welty in a complex tradition of women writers that includes Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather and surveys the whole range of Eudora Welty's five decades of writing. Using recent critical theory as a backdrop, the author explores Welty's radical strategies to decenter patriarchal traditions of narrative authority. She shows how Welty reaches back through myth to recover long traditions of female self-sufficiency and strength that have been deliberately obscured by masculine culture. What emerges is an understanding of Eudora Welty as an essentially comic and affirmative writer whose work is at once centrally feminine and broadly human. Contents: 1. A Sheltered Life; 2. A Generous Comic Muse; 3. Apprenticeship; 4. Demeter and Kore in Mississippi; 5. New Women; 6. Welty's Affirmations; Notes; Bibliography; Index^R