I look at Marian in her little red cap and think, kid, it wouldn’t kill you to sit there for a few minutes and brighten their day. They have no one to turn their frustrations on but each other. God help those old women, stuffed away in a cheap care facility to wait out their deaths. But reading it again at an age much closer to the crones than the Campfire Girl, I find my sympathies shifted. I had lived enough at twelve to know there were old people out there who wanted to swallow you up, and so my heart went out to this selfish girl. They may have been mad or demented, but mostly they are desperate for her attention and her ability to disrupt the boredom of their day.
Marian is an unsympathetic centerpiece, wanting only to deliver her plant to some old lady and get her credit points, but I was terrified for her nevertheless, as she is shoved into the tiny, sick-smelling room with two old ladies and their claw-like hands. I was twelve, slightly younger than the story’s Campfire Girl. My introduction to Welty was the story “A Visit of Charity,” which I read in a seventh grade textbook for English class. There could be no truer account of my own experience with The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, and since I’ve come to praise, it seems only fitting to use her praise of Woolf as the place from which to set sail.
No matter how often we begin it again, it seems to expand and expand again ahead of us.” Yet discovery, in the reading of a great original work, does not depend on its initial newness to us. “Personal discovery is the direct and, I suspect, the appropriate route to To the Lighthouse. Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude.” I might have missed it if it hadn’t been for the strong signal in the title. If it seems unbelievable today, this was possible to do in 1930 in Mississippi, when I was young, reading at my own will and as pleasure led me. “As it happened,” Welty’s foreword begins, “I came to discover To the Lighthouse for myself. I didn’t realize the bonus I was getting until I opened the book. The copy I bought had the words “with a foreword by Eudora Welty” at the top of the front cover in tiny white letters that all but disappeared into the skyline above the name Virginia Woolf. So many years had passed since I’d first picked it up that I remembered nothing but Mrs.
Not long ago, I decided it was time to reread To the Lighthouse, or I should say it was time to read it. We’re delighted to share that introduction on Musing today. Today marks the publication of the new edition of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, with an introduction by Ann Patchett.
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