The following excerpt describes the relationship between Porter and the character of Miranda in "The Grave."

In "The Grave," through her fictional representative Miranda, Porter describes an incident which had happened about the time her grandmother died in 1901. Porter was accompanying her brother on a rabbit-shooting expedition when he shot and eviscerated a female rabbit carrying young. In the story Miranda is just experiencing the first stirrings of her female destiny. She is growing tired of being a tomboy and yearns for the trappings of femininity: pretty clothes, jewelry, and perfumes. The knowledge thrust upon her so crudely and abruptly when her brother lays open the womb of the dead rabbit is a shock. Yet this knowledge of the other, more dangerous, side of female destiny seems something she has really known all along (Miranda's mother, like Porter's own, had died as a result of childbearing).

The...