SOURCE: Bauer, Margaret Donovan. “Ellen Gilchrist's Women Who Would Be Queens (and Those Who Would Dethrone Them).” Mississippi Quarterly 55, no. 1 (winter 2001-2002): 117-31.

In the following essay, Bauer investigates Gilchrist's portrayal of women in her fiction.

“There is an old gorgeous man living right here in Jackson, Mississippi, that I have been loving and fighting with and showing off for since I was born. … My father.”¹

“It's that old daddy. … That's who we love.”²

My study of Ellen Gilchrist's fiction has illuminated for me the frustrations of women like her prototypical Rhoda Manning: women of my mother's generation who grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s within upper middle-class families and who were allowed, even encouraged, to go to college but were sent there for that MRS. degree more so than for any B.A. or B.S.—in other words, to get enough education to help attract...