[What Miss O'Connor wrote] about might be comprehended by the word "mystery." "There are two qualities that make fiction," she was fond of saying: "One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of experience that surrounds you"; the sense of mystery is the writer's own. [Mystery] for Miss O'Connor, a Roman Catholic,… centered upon the three basic theological doctrines of the Church: the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment. The South provided her with a language and a social fabric, a "texture of experience," but it was never more than the scene for a pageant universally enacted, the pageant of salvation through divine grace.

As an artist in the Jamesian tradition, profoundly convinced that a story "must carry its meaning inside it," Miss O'Connor was sensitive to the charge that Christian dogma inhibited a writer...