SOURCE: Grove, James. “Anne Tyler: Wrestling with the ‘Lowlier Angel.’” In Southern Writers at Century's End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins, pp. 134-50. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

In the following essay, Grove discusses Tyler as a Southern writer and elucidates the role of place in Morgan's Passing.

Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair, and feeling, who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates place into the shade. Nevertheless, it is this lowlier angel that concerns us here.

—Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction”

Place is one of the lesser angels watching over the racing hand of...