SOURCE: "The Love Ethos of Porter, Welty, and McCullers," in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, edited by Carol S. Manning, University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 235-43.

In the following excerpt, Kieft explores Porter's attitudes toward love and romantic relationships as shaped by her personal experiences and reflected in her writing.

Since love is a central theme in much fiction, especially that of women writers, it is not surprising to find the theme dominant in the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. What is surprising, given their time and place in the most conservative part of the country, the South (Texas, Mississippi, Georgia) in the first half of the twentieth century, is the extent to which each writer, though she could not totally escape conventional codes and attitudes toward love, essentially subverted them in her life as a fiction writer. Their contrasting lives and...