[In her Collected Stories] Eudora Welty's real self percolates into a generous fiction that wastes very little time on disapproval. She wanders, marveling, over the landscape of soul and senses, never allowing the smallest fluctuation in either to escape her, but she is not a moralist. She has no vocation for rectitude, and one can search in vain among dozens of her springy, piquant, often irascible characters for those implications of psychological delinquency that give such dramatic tension to the stories of Henry James. Yet she is no less a psychologist; she simply is more interested in our efforts and longings than in our guilts and weaknesses. (p. 3)
Whenever she discerns a fault in someone, she leaves room for an advantage or a felicity. In "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," three biddies of an age to wear widow's black and get hot easily are about to plump a slightly retarded young lady into an institution for the feeble-minded, presumably for her own happiness. When they find her at home packing a hope chest (so far she has collected one bar of soap and a wash rag) and preparing to get married to a traveling xylophone player, the ladies are aghast—in good part because she has outwitted their pessimism and shattered their complacency. This ignoble sentiment would no doubt be the chief disclosure for some other writer, but it is their sheepishness and hesitation that Miss Welty wants to call to our attention….
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