Demeter and Kore in Mississippi

Abstract

‘I’m a short-story writer who writes novels the hard way, and by accident,’ Eudora Welty has said (CNVRS, p. 86). Her first true novel — and her masterpiece — began with a short story called The Delta Cousins’ and then grew unexpectedly. She had produced The Robber Bridegroom under pressure from editors who felt that the legitimate form of important fiction was the novel, but that book is more a playfully extended tale than a novel. ‘The Delta Cousins’ was a story continuing the exploration of feminine encounters with masculine sexuality which was such an important element in The Wide Net. As Michael Kreyling has shown, the story presents ‘the theme of innocence in the character of motherless, sensitive, nine-year-old Laura Kimball, shadowed but never touched by the world of “real” experience that threatens the peace and wonder of her private world’.¹ The sinister world of experience which Laura encounters is more particularly the world of adult sexuality represented by an old beekeeper who exposes himself in front of Laura and her cousin India. When she sent ‘The Delta Cousins’ to her agent Diarmuid Russell, he wrote back and said, ‘Eudora, this is chapter two of a novel. Go on with it’ (CNVRS, p. 180).