When Flannery O'Connor's first novel was published in England in 1955, the reviews, she said, were 'respectful but not very perceptive'. Since then she has been somewhat neglected here, though there are signs that she is to be given her due as a writer of great originality and power….

That her modest output shouldn't have found a wide readership in England isn't entirely surprising. There's her bizarre-sounding name, which, as with other similarly under-valued American writers of the Deep South—Eudora Welty, Walker Percy—sounds alien to English ears. There's the strange allusiveness of her titles, drawn from local sayings ('You Can't Be Any Poorer than Dead'), from Teilhard de Chardin ('Everything That Rises Must Converge'), and from St Matthew ('The Violent Bear It Away')…. And the English reader familiar with Faulkner and Twain is likely to feel that her predominantly rural Georgia settings, her vividly rendered 'poor white'...