SOURCE: "Death and the Mountains in The Optimist's Daughter," in Essays in Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 77-85.

In the following essay, Watkins discusses the importance of mountains in Welty's life and in her novel The Optimist's Daughter.

The pervasive relationship between character and place in fiction is especially important and subtle in the fiction of Eudora Welty. Place derives not only from natural geographical characteristics but also from human history and the events that have happened there. In one of several lectures and essays on the subject, Weky comments on the endurance of life in place, which transcends time, locality, and changes in the terrain:

Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things—regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads, and...