Delta Wedding

by Eudora Welty

Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild's wedding. An only child whose mother has just died, Laura is resentful of her boisterous, careless cousins, and desperate for their acceptance. As the hour moves closer and closer to wedding day, Laura arrives at a more subtle understanding of both the Fairchilds and herself.

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty is one of the South's finest novelists. She won a Pulitzer in 1972 for The Optimist's Daughter. Delta Wedding is her best known work.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Southern, Historical Fiction, Book Club, Novels, American

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Eudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.

Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.

During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.

Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.

Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Introduction to the classic by Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, was by one of my most beloved authors, Ann Patchett. She talks about first discovering Eudora Welty at age fourteen when she was living on the edge of a tobacco farm outside Raleigh, North Carolina and read a short story by Ms. Welty that made her realize that she knew these characters and landscape and perhaps she could also be a writer thus changing her life. Ann Patchett states that although she loved all of her books, Delta Wedding was one of her favorites. And one of my favorite quotes from her Introduction that pretty well sums up Delta Wedding:

"It's as messy a story, in fact, as real life is."

Delta Wedding is a southern classic novel by Eudora Welty that takes place over one week in September 1923 on the Fairchilds plantation, Shellmound, in the Mississippi Delta. This novel is character driven and without a plot as one views the South and its many eccentricities through the multigenerational Fairchilds family. They have all gathered together for the upcoming wedding of Dabney, the second eldest daughter of Battle and Ellen Fairchild, and now expecting their tenth child. The book unfolds basically in the eyes of nine-year old Laura McRaven visiting from Jackson. Laura's mother, Annie Laurie, was a Fairchild. She had died the previous winter with this being an opportunity for Laura to become acquainted with her mother's family since she has not returned since the funeral.

This was Laura's first journey alone. Her father rode part of the way with her as far as Yazoo City and put her on the Yazoo-Delta line but nicknamed the Yellow Dog where every window was propped open and yellow butterflies flew in at any window and out any other. It is noted that outdoors one butterfly could keep up with the train.

"Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it. In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky. The clouds were large--larger than horses or houses, larger than boats or churches or gins, larger than anything except the fields the Fairchilds planted."

"The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it. Sometimes in the cotton were trees with one, two or three arms--she could draw better trees than those were."

"In the Delta the sunsets were reddest light. The sun went down lopsided and wide as a rose on a stem in the west, and the west was a milk-white edge, like the foam of the sea. The sky, the field, the little track, and the bayou, over and over--all that had been bright or dark was now one color. From the warm window sill the endless fields glowed like a hearth in the firelight, and Laura, looking out, leaning on her elbows with her head between her hands, felt what an arriver in a land feels-- that slow hard pounding in the breast."

As Laura is embraced by this large, loving, and complicated Fairchilds family during her time at Shellmound, I found myself just having to trust that I wasn't missing an important plot point and just revel in the mayhem.

And I must say that I am not surprised that Eudora Welty was Ann Patchett's favorite author as she gives us a twenty-first century Eudora Welty in spinning her beloved stories and her unforgettable characters over the years. I will certainly be reading more of both writers.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this 2 years ago, and loved it every bit as much this time around. A big, multi-generational, chaotic family; aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody a part of the Fairchild clan, except, funnily enough, no grand-parents, now that I think of it. Wonderful, sweet, old maid aunts Primrose and Jim Allen, busybody take charge Aunt Tempe, saintly mother Ellen and her 8 children, all spoiled rotten in a nice way. Daphne, the 2nd oldest daughter, decides at 17 to marry the plantation overseer Troy. No one wants her to marry beneath her station, but there's no stopping her, so a wedding must be planned. All of the action takes place in the week before and few days after the wedding. The Mississippi Delta is as much a character here as anyone else. Eudora Welty's love for the natural world is much in evidence in her descriptions of the place, and she puts you right in the middle of this huge family, with conversations running all over top of each other. Her depiction of children, their actions and ways of thinking, are as realistic as any I've ever read.

Favorite quotes: "You never had to grow up if you were spoiled enough. It was comforting, if things turned out not to be what you thought.....

"She felt again, but differently, that men were no better than little children. Women, she was glad to think, did know a little better--though everything they knew they would have to keep to themselves....oh, forever!

Women do have the upper hand in this book, at least around the old plantation house in 1923, at least when planning a wedding, and keeping the men out of their way so things can get done. A very satisfying read for me.

[Chrissie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have decided to dump this. I have read more than half. I have suffered every minute along the way. The trip has been agonizing.

What is it that I dislike?

Most of the lines go nowhere; little of any consequence is said. Daily chores and occurrences are spoken of over and over and over again. One is drowned by the minutia. Rarely does anything of significance happen.

A reader may consider skipping one paragraph, but you soon discover you cannot. Among all the lines saying nothing, you run across one short, short sentence that says a lot. One assumes, if you miss that, you cannot possibly understand what is to follow. In addition, that which is said, in those few lines of clarity, is often ignored, stuffed under the mat by those in the family. Family harmony must be maintained! This irritates me too.

Yet, the primary stumbling block IS for me the prose. The sentences are never-ending and as a consequence confusing. Dialogs do capture the brogue of the South, but when a reader is unable to make head or tale of what is meant, they fail to improve to the text. I adore Southern literature and I favor those books that incorporate Southern dialects, but not here.

I feel nothing for the characters, and there are way too many of them. In-depth character portrayal has yet to be achieved.

The plot? Well,there isn’t very much, but Dabney Fairchld (17 years) is to be married. Her cousin, Laura (9 years), comes to visit the Fairchild family. Their residence is Shellmound in the Mississippi Delta. Laura’s mother has just died, so Laura cannot be at the wedding ceremony, but will being with family bring comfort? Relatives gather days before the event. They eat, they prepare for the wedding and retell family stories. With each retelling tidbits of information are (sometimes) added. All may appear rosy on the surface, but underneath lie secrets, calamities and scandals.

Think of a large family gathering extended over several days. Think of those large family gatherings in which you have partaken. If YOU love such gatherings and feel happy and relaxed in such company, you might feel at home here. Me? I wonder if family gatherings are all just fun and games. Consider the tension. Consider the quarrels, jealousies and hurts bubbling underneath. Should such be smothered or hidden?

There is no point in continuing. I cannot get around the prose style; this is not going to change! The non-existent plot doesn’t pull me in and I see no sign of in-depth character portrayal.

My suggestion is that you take a peek at the text. The novel is available free online here: https://100-vampire-novels.com/pdf-no...
For the test, do not start at the beginning; pick any old paragraph right in the middle. You will then have a chance to taste the writing. If you are happy, go back to the beginning.

I have to be fair. There are descriptions of the land that I do like. Here is one:

“Laura brought up her saved banana, peeled it down, and bit into it.”

“Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it. In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky. The clouds were large—larger than horses or houses, larger than boats or churches or gins, larger than anything except the fields the Fairchilds planted. Her nose in the banana skin as in the cup of a lily, she watched the Delta. The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.”

Books I do not want to finish, I give one star.

*****************

I have now tried stories and novels by Welty. I am not going to read her any more. She is just not for me.

Why I Live at the P.O. and Other Stories 1 star
Delta Wedding 1 star
A Worn Path 2 stars
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies 3 stars

[Pat Settegast · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up in a family of four kids, and during the summer, we shared a lakehouse with another large family. Nearby, several other families from our church also had lakehouses. Every day - throughout the entire summer - was largely spent swimming, waterskiing, and biking with a huge extended family of other kids. We played games like spotlight and ghost in the graveyard almost every night. Around the Fourth of July, we had firework wars that were truly epic. No was ever alone. Each moment was a spontaneous burst of activity.

I have always had a difficult time explaining this experience to people without becoming overly sentimental and nostalgic. If I were to ever try to set this down in words, I would want my story would have a tenth of the power and raw energy of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding.

I have read half a study's worth of "southern" novels, and none of them have depicted the culture in which I grew up. Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding is a welcomed exception to my reading experience. This masterful novel manages to funnel a massive cast of characters into a single setting; there's nearly one hundred distinct voices running through the narrative in regular intervals. It also weaves in themes of gris-gris, ghosts, and the importance of the land with a style that at times approaches magical realism. It is a highly unpredictable book, commenting on itself in jaunty asides and managing a emphemeral sense of both action and place effortlessly.

That being said, this is also a book of great finesse and manners. It requires an immense amount concentration and skill on the part of the reader to discover the hidden depths of the characters. Each passage reads like a puzzle with clues secreted away with great care. In a large part, the theme is about the implicit depth of dedicated superficiality, and the plot flies in the face of conventions like conflict and pacing, favoring a surrealist or impressionist approach to more conventional narrative structures. A great number of questions are posed and left unanswered.

In the end, I love this book because it expressed a part of myself I've never had words for, and it gave meaning to a set of experiences that - lacking expression - I had misunderstood as meaningless.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, the ninth, is to discuss your favorite character in a novel to hate.

Dabney. Hands down, Dabney. What a self-centered nightmare of a spoiled brat! She's marryin' 'neath her, that no-count Troy is just scramblin' for a place in the Fairchilds! But Dabney, she knows:

"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring....

And still, there's something deeply Southern in Dabney's greed, something that life in the lush heat of the land down by the water just puts in you, makes you part of it:

The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....

Dabney's complete inability to see the other person as real makes her a monster, that familiar monster, The Southern Belle. She hasn't got room for anyone but herself in the movie of her life:

Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now.

Things, the stuff that surrounds people like the Fairchilds from cradle to grave (and they'd take it on as grave goods if only people still did that), *those* evoke tears and memories. Not the people, not the little damn-near stranger in the Fairchild midst, little motherless Laura whose presence is unwished for but accepted because she is Family.

And in the end, that's where we end up in this novel, in the Family. Like every family, the Fairchilds have codes and shortcuts in their communication that seem designed to exclude others. That includes the reader of the novel, in fact. But it's not that the Fairchilds don't want you to understand them, or that Miss Eudora failed to give you the keys to a roman à clef. It's this very experience that's the point of the novel. Either you like that experience, or you don't, but this is the point:

Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened!

Now that said, what makes this book fall short of four stars for me, an ardent Eudoraist? Novels aren't like short stories in that the introduction of a character or inclusion of a detail must be part of the essential nature of the book. There are about a squillion voices in this chorus, and that's just way too many. WAY too many. So there isn't a long-term investment in the current carrying us to...to...wherever it is we're going and we don't quite get to. Miss Eudora could've pruned the voices to Dabney, Uncle George, and Laura, and been able to tell the same big, noisy story. But this is a novel, and writing novels was not Miss Eudora's métier. That was the short story, a form of which she was a mistress.

In the end, as much as I loved to hate Dabney and her cut-rate Scarlett-ness, I was only slightly less appalled by the sheer feckless ridiculousness of George, Dabney's uncle and the Fairchild Golden Boy, and the cult surrounding him. His morganatic marriage to Robbie is summed up by Aunt Ellen, one of his groupies:

It seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling.

That gets to the heart of my dislike and discomfort with George. He's so spoiled, so cossetted and babied, that only a severe adrenaline jolt (at someone else's expense) will do to fetch him up among the living.

It's not hard for me to appreciate this novel for what it is, but it's not at all the beau ideal of a novelist's art. I like it, I understand why others don't, but goodness me give me the lush, rich, deeply felt beauty of Welty's prose any old way it comes.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eudora Welty writes books that seem to be about nothing in particular. There are seldom any staggering occurrences. It is all about life. Of course, there is a major event coming in this novel, Dabney Fairchild is marrying, and all the family are gathering for the event; aunts, uncles, cousins, great-aunts, in-laws, all assembling to see Dabney off from the family home to a home of her own.

Along the way, we meet an array of fantastic characters, each an embodiment of their Southern heritage. This is a way of life that is virtually gone, I suppose, but it is a way of life that opens so many memories for me that it makes me want to cry. I was never, of course, one of THESE Southern belles, with the portico porches or land wealth and stores, but I can easily recall days when everyone from five generations would be gathered together in this same kind of family mash that sometimes brought with it ease and sometimes strain.

Welty knows people. Every word they utter in her stories rings with truth and veracity. You feel you have met them, you are there on the porch, you are sipping the iced tea, swinging the children, kissing the uncles. You are safe, as they are safe, because you have family, you belong, someone cares.

It has taken me a long time to get around to reading this wonderful story. I can add it to my list of Eudora Welty wonders that I have loved.

[Camie · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I were tested on this book I would most assuredly fail. Luckily I see I am not the first to call it " a jumbled up mess." Here's the bit I understood. The book is about the Fairchild's a large lively Southern family living on a plantation called Shellmound in the 1920's. It's cast of characters (which includes all distant relatives, servants, neighbors, ancestors, pets, and etc. ) is roughly 40 + and they are there for the wedding of Dabney the sweetheart of the family and Troy the overseer. There's a child Laura , a nine year old girl whose mother has died who is the first person introduced in the book as she journeys to the wedding. Luckily she will continue to pop up throughout the book which means someone will be familiar. Eudora Welty must have had some fun coming up with all of the names you'll encounter in this book , but if you're like me very few will be memorable. If I read this 5 or 6 times I could do a better review .
2 stars

[Lori Keeton · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is 1923 and the rather large Fairchild family are preparing the plantation for a wedding. That is the plot of this story and nothing else really happens on Shellmound plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Ellen and Battle Fairchild have eight children with a ninth on the way. Their 17 year old daughter, Dabney is marrying her father’s overseer who is twice her age and not exactly the type of man they expected her to fall in love with. But they don’t really talk about it. A cousin whose mother just recently died, 9 year old Laura McRaven, has come for the wedding festivities on the Yellow Dog, the name they’ve given to the train.

Delta Wedding is really a portrait of a close multi-generational family. They have some of the best names ever - Bluet, Little Battle, Ranny, India, Orrin, Aunt Tempe and spinster sisters Jim Allen and Primrose. A family has all types of personalities and characters with many different tempers and ideas. The Fairchilds show how real life can be a bit chaotic and disorderly with so many people involved. Welty allows the reader to see the chaos from the eyes of young cousin Laura who just wants to be a real member of the family and from the eyes of the eldest sister, Shelley’s diary and from the eyes of Robbie, related by marriage and not really accepted. The women are the ones who run this family and take care of things. Battle is the head of the family but his brother George is really the center of the family emotionally. He seems to be the one all of the members revolve all of their talk around. He is the best of all of the Fairchilds - and we hear the story about the day he risked his life to free his niece from a railroad track from everyone’s perspective.

This one took me a little bit to get into the flow and figure out that nothing was really happening except the bantering and amusing conversations of the inhabitants of Shellmound. Once I got into the idea of the story, I just allowed the characters to show me and tell me what they wanted to say and do and it all worked out pretty well.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in the American South, published in 1946 and set in 1923. It is about a wedding and revolves around the plantation of the Fairchild family and a family wedding. There is no real plot and very little happens. This is deliberate and Welty says she picked 1923 because it was a year when very little happened in the delta. The cast of characters is extensive and working out the relationships between the various members of the Fairchild clan isn’t straightforward. There are no skeletons in cupboards, no major family dramas (some minor quarrels), no bitternesses on the surface. The social structure is clear, it is a plantation and the servant class is black, but there are no resentments here either. The shadows of the Civil War, Reconstruction and Slavery don’t seem to exist here. The plantation is thriving and productive and the problems relatively minor. This certainly isn’t Faulkner or O’Neill. What is important to Welty is place and family. She captures place very well. The whole plot is the run up to a wedding, the last few days of preparation and the day itself. The writing does have a depth to it. Some of the novel is seen through the eyes of Laura, a young girl (about 8) who is a cousin to the Fairchild’s. Laura’s mother has recently died and she is going to stay with the family for the wedding:
“Laura from her earliest memory had heard how they “never seemed to change at all.” That was the way her mother who had been away from them down in Jackson where they would be hard to believe, could brag on them without seeming to. And yet Laura could see that they changed every moment. The outside did not change but the inside did; an iridescent life was busy within and under each alikeness. Laughter at something went over the table; Laura found herself with a picture in her mind of a great bower-like cage full of tropical birds her father had shown her in a zoo in a city – the sparkle of motion was like a rainbow, while it was the very thing that broke your heart, for the birds that flew were caged all the time and could not fly out. The Fairchilds’ movements were quick and on the instant, and that made you wonder, are they free? Laura was certain that they were compelled – their favorite word.”
As a reader you do become immersed in the story and the texture of it. That immersion I didn’t find entirely pleasant because of the almost total dislocation from the society around and my inability to connect with the characters. I felt this would have worked better as a short story.

[Lawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delta Wedding: Lingering Awhile

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty was chosen by members of On the Southern Literary Trail as its group read for November, 2015. Special thanks to Co-Moderator Diane "Miss Scarlett" for nominating this work

The time is coming soon to say goodbye
A time of sadness it will be
But, honey, listen to my parting sigh
And linger on awhile with me

The stars above you, yet linger awhile
They whisper I love you,oh linger awhile
And when you have gone away
Every hour seems like a day
I've something to tell you
Oh linger awhile

The stars above you, yet linger awhile
They whisper I love you, oh linger awhile
And when you have gone away
Every hour seems like a day

Vincent Hall, Music; Harry Owens, Lyrics (1923)

Eudora Welty, Portrait, A Portrait Reader, July, 2015

>blockquote>Delta Wedding, F. ed., Harcourt, New York, New York 1946

Work in Progress. More to follow...

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this the first time almost exactly 50 years ago.

This time I enjoyed it more. Such an exuberant JOY. And I did not have any trouble keeping the names straight, either.

The pure energy has empowered me. It's good that it has inspired. Because 40 people are coming for dinner tomorrow and I still have more to do.

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Troy Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fairchilds are a large plantation family in the Mississippi Delta, preparing for a wedding in the sultry September of 1923.

This novel is not plot-driven; it focuses on the few days leading up to the wedding and the wedding day itself. There is a cast of characters and I found it a little difficult, initially, to remember who’s who and how they are all connected, but I got there in the end.

For me, the novel’s strength is in its sense of place. Eudora Welty’s description of the house and its gardens, the food being prepared for the big day, and hectic interactions between the people who inhabit the house, is handled beautifully.

Delta Wedding requires concentration and dedication but it is worth it, just to become immersed in its world.

[Kirk Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is softer than a down cushion. More cozy than a pile of warm quilts. I'm not from a large family, so it was amusing to think what it would be like with a good dozen or more of your close family all under one roof. All generations back to great aunts! A lively and chaotic household with twice that many by the time of the wedding. Captures a time and place I could have barely imagined.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Story Of Shellmound

I have of late been reading some long, ambitiously sprawling novels that attempt, with questionable success, to capture a large historical era or place. I have also been reading novels which are radically different in style and scope. These novels take small scenes and discrete places, times, and characters, and attempt to develop them. In words of the poet George Oppen, such novels "write the great world small". Among the latter type of novels are those of Eudora Welty (1909 - 2001). Welty lived her entire life in Jackson, Mississippi. In her five novels and her many short stories, she wrote about places she knew intimately. Her novels develop slowly into works of significance. On the whole, I find this type of novel, of restricted scope, more successful than the larger type.

Welty's second novel "Delta Wedding" developed from a short story titled "The Delta Cousins" that three magazines initially rejected. She expanded the story into a novel with the working title, "Shellmound" after the Delta plantation in which most of the story takes place. "Delta Wedding" first appeared serialized in the Atlantic Monthly" and was published as a novel in 1946.

The book is a seemingly simple story of a large, close family, the Fairchilds, their plantation, Shellmound, near Fairchilds, Mississippi, and the wedding of young Dabney Fairchild, 17, to the overseer of the plantation, Troy Flavin, 34. The book takes place over about one week in September, 1923. It unfolds slowly and deliberately as Welty describes in painstaking detail the plantation, the Delta fields, the Yazoo River, the town of Fairchilds, the wedding between Dabney and Troy and its lengthy preparations, the Yellow Dog train, and the Fairchilds themselves, and their relationship to family members and others.

Much of the story is told through the eye of nine-year old Laura McRaven, whose recently deceased mother was a Fairchild. As the book begins, Laura travels on the Yellow Dog from Jackson to attend Dabney's wedding. She does not realize at the time that the Fairchilds are considering asking her to live with them at Shellmound. Laura, however, is not the sole focus of the novel. As the story develops, many members of the large Fairchild family are closely described, and many members speak in their own voices.

Although many stories and people are developed in the book, the most interesting member of the Fairchild family is George, the younger brother of Battle Fairchild. Battle lives on Shellmound with his wife Ellen, from Virginia, and their many children, including Dabney, the second-oldest daughter. Ellen is again pregnant as the wedding proceeds. Battle's brother George is a lawyer who lives in Memphis with his wife, Robbie. The Fairchilds tend to look down on Robbie due to her origins and have never fully accepted her. So too, the Fairchilds have some dissatisfaction with Troy due to his status as their overseer, his "slowness", and his origin in the Mississippi hills, outside the Delta. Thus, when George comes to Shellmound to participate in Dabney's wedding, Robbie has briefly left him. The incident that provoked Robbie to leave occurred two weeks earlier when, on a fishing outing, the family carelessly walked on a right of way trestle of the Yellow Dog. The train came while feeble-minded Maureen, the sole daughter of Dennis Fairchild, was caught on the trestle. The free-spirited Dennis was a family hero, killed in WW I. George rescued Maureen and, in any event, the Yellow Dog stopped just in time. Robbie was jealous of George's seeming devotion to the family at her expense. Yet, she knows of George's love and reminds the family that "he begged me" to marry.

Welty finds George differs from the other members of the Fairchild family and describes him through other family members. Thus, when George Fairchild is first introduced, we see him through the eyes of Dabney:

"She saw Uncle George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for that butterfly inside his sleepy body. It was very strange but she had felt it. She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then -- that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made a sort of house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny."

A few pages latter, Dabney expands her understanding of George:

"George loved the world, something told her suddenly. Not them! Not them in particular."

As the story develops, George, with his wisdom, warm-heartedness, impulsiveness, and ability to live with and respond to what is around him, becomes, for me, the dominant presence of this book. George's ability to see value in the commonplace world of the everyday mirrors Welty's writing, as she piles detail upon detail in telling her story. The details somehow manage to show how a mundane story of a wedding and a place has a human, and then almost metaphysical, significance.

"Delta Wedding" is a slow book which requires patience to read. It includes many characters in a short space. The Delta and its people are lovingly described. For all its simplicity this is a difficult book in Welty's presentation of her material from many points of view. Welty goes beyond small factual descriptions to invest the book with a sense that life is particular and precious in finding love and meaning in the everyday.

Robin Friedman

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover of this edition claims Delta Wedding is “a wonderfully entertaining portrait of an ebullient Southern family and an exquisitely woven celebration of Southern life”...but that’s not the book I read. Somehow I got hold of a much darker novel.

In the Mississippi delta, on the banks of the Yazoo – “the river of death” – live the Fairchild family, whose children think they are born from a mysterious cotton sack carried on the back of an elderly former slave. And so they are. The Fairchilds are plantation owners who now endlessly recycle the past – even talk to the dead – in their rotting, rat-infested family redoubts. They don’t fear change – just pretend it isn’t happening. And their delta wedding is more of a danse macabre than a celebration.

But the wonderful thing about Delta Wedding is that you could probably read the novel quite differently. It is an extraordinarily dense and rich book with so much going on that it’s almost impossible to keep track of it on just one reading. Symbolism is laid on with a trowel – so that you start to be suspicious of any artefact or event: the bird in the house, the lost brooch, the Yellow Dog train, the incident on the bridge.What do they mean? What do they mean?

Yet Eudora Welty’s trowelling is effective. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I like it. Delta Wedding is packed with the power and mystery of story. Splendidly rich stuff – haunting and memorable.

[Malacorda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sta bene il romanzo actionless, tutto fatto di descrizioni, tappezzerie dai colori tenui, ninnoli esposti in bell'ordine sul tavolino nel bow window, chiacchiericcio sommesso e allusivo e a tratti onirico. Sta bene anche la narrazione con ritmo lento e placido come il grande fiume. Però, stanti queste premesse, mi è mancato un quid.
La gran quantità di frasi e pensieri dal significato assolutamente vago, indefinito, sibillino (o forse è più sincero ammettere inesistente...) arriva infine a frustrare e spazientire. A tratti mi ha ricordato qualcosa della Lispector. E anche i dubliners di Joyce, letto mille anni fa.
Innegabili gli aspetti di modernità, anzi contemporaneità: la grande e solida famiglia americana è sempre la stessa che ancora oggi si trova in tanti film e serie. Il senso di solitudine patito da ciascuno dei membri della famiglia, una sensazione viepiù accentuata paradossalmente proprio dal vivere tutti così a stretto contatto, perennemente insieme, tutto in totale condivisione: in ultima analisi, una solitudine più bislacca della solitudine vera e propria, anche questo è un tema attualissimo. La coralità del romanzo è in perfetto equilibrio: ci si aspetta di vedere emergere uno dei membri della famiglia, e invece rimangono tutti sullo stesso piano. Il punto di vista al femminile: non particolarmente sviscerato ma nemmeno banalizzato. Da rilevare anche un principio di innamoramento tra i cognati Ellen e George: è raccontato bene perché appena accennato e non sbrodolato.
Morale: una di quelle letture dall'esito controverso; se da un lato mi ha annoiata, è pur vero che dall'altro lato mi fa comunque piacere averla letta e piacevole resta il ricordo di esserci stata immersa.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars…..this author is never a “one size fits all” for me. I’ve ranked her books from 2 to 5 stars. She makes it interesting and have at least 2 more of her books that I really want to read sooner than later. To be fair, I did audio so the numerous characters may have overwhelmed me by listening to it.

[Sabrisab · Rating 3 out of 5]

non male ma non credo indimenticabile, forse il suo unico problema è essere stato letto dopo Faulkner.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

And all the little parlor things she had a moment ago cherished she suddenly wanted to break. She had once seen Uncle George, without saying a word, clench his fist in the dining room at home—the sweetest man in the Delta. It is because people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness—wrapped like bulbs, she thought soberly; I don’t know what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Delta Wedding was Eudora Welty’s first novel (with The Robber Bridegroom being more of a novella), following her success as a short story writer. Both of those things – this being her first novel and that prior to this she was primarily a short story writer – show in the book. Welty brings a precision of language and description to every scene in the novel – this sort of precision works extremely well in a short story, where scene is established and inhabited; but here, in the novel setting, scenes change frequently, causing a continual overload of descriptive passages (if I had to estimate I’d hazard that a third or so of the novel was dedicated to scene description) as Welty captures every nuance and detail of each setting. The precision of the descriptions are each – on their own – wonderful and insightful, but by the mid-point of the novel I was a bit weary of reading another multi-page description of another sitting room. The writing is exceptional, but it becomes burdensome.

The characterization and family background is approached with the same level of detail, but this is actually a major strength of the work – Welty has brought to life a large and elaborate family setting, all with backstory and history and roots, and carries the individuals – all complex and shifting and intertwined – and interactions through the tumultuous week leading up to the titular wedding.

So, I felt this work was flawed – had I not then this would be a five star read 100% based on how damn great of a writer Welty is – but even in that it was quite good; good enough to keep reading through the others I have by her.

Having read The Optimist’s Daughter - her final novel – earlier this week, it’s fairly easy to see how she would eventually develop as a novelist; the later book is pared down and crystalline, without sacrificing scene or characterization. But Welty, even in this early work, manages to capture time, place, and family with beautiful and unrelenting detail; added to that, the work is crafted with tenderness towards the characters that populate it, making this a charming and inviting read.

(This book was enough to convince me to go ahead and purchase a collection of all of Welty’s short stories – that alone should stand as recommendation enough)

[Pennie Larina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Как же это прекрасно и трехмерно. Роман о событии, которое даже и не событие - ну да, свадьба в Дельте, как и было обещано, и действие начинается с того, что маленькая девочка едет из города в поезде на эту свадьбу, а заканчивается пикником через несколько дней после свадьбы; героев довольно много, и все они, наверное, равнозначимы - сначала кажется, что главной героиней будет девочка, но скоро ты понимаешь, что все (кажется, что сотни) ее кузин, кузенов, тетушек и пратетушек, будут почти такими же полноценными и полнокровными героями, а некоторым из них тоже будет предоставлено слово (нет, не от первого лица, просто как точка зрения).
И такая же трехмерная Дельта, вода, дрозды, хлопок, сонная одурь сентябрьской жары, хотя никаких излишних описаний природы не наблюдается, и дома, которые понастроили эти безумные Фейрчайлды - и я даже не знаю, к природе их отнести или к людям.

[Emily]

I've been writing a lot lately about feminist musicologist Susan McClary and her ideas about the need for an alternative narrative practice. McClary goes in search of a mode of storytelling that does not dwell in a land of perpetual desire, of constant striving for a climax or resolution which, once achieved, spells the end of the story (the so-called "phallic" or "heroic" narrative arc), but that instead stresses pleasure over desire, that glories in what McClary calls a "voluptuous 'being-in-time' quality" - an examination of what we have and who we are, rather than what I want and who I would rather be. Understandably, when I've written about this in the past certain people have commented thusly: "That's a cool idea, but what would a "non-phallic" novel look like?" Well now, my friends, I can tell you: for a heartbreakingly beautiful example of prose that savors its own moment, its voluptuous being-in-time, look no further than Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding.

The plot of Delta Wedding is so simple it's basically contained in the title: Welty gives us subtle, lush, yet endlessly dynamic portrait of a large family in the Mississippi Delta, preparing for the wedding of their second daughter as the bustle of life goes on around the group and its individual members. The Fairchild clan is always in motion: "there's always so much - so much happening here!" cries an aunt delightedly, and Welty excels at capturing the lovingly oppressive whirl of the packed plantation house, bursting at the seams with arrivals, departures, personal legends and their aftermaths, cross-currents of conversation, momentary crises and unlooked-for delights. Yet many characters realize, or feel, at different moments, that for all the whirling bustle of the Fairchild life, there is a way in which their constant state of iridescent change is itself an unchanging landscape

Robbie put her hand up to her head a minute as she danced, against the whirl. Dabney was dancing before her, by herself, eyes shining on them all...Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened! But the next moment Miss Primrose and Miss Jim Allen arrived with so much authority and ado that she almost had to believe in them.

Throughout this novel, Welty plays with the tension between the changing and unchanging, the momentary and the perennial. In describing the Delta twilight, she writes, "It was not yet dark - it would never get dark." A baby is about to be born who will carry the name of his dead war-hero uncle, long remembered by the family. And at the close of the book, one of the youngest children tells her cousin "My secret is...I've seen it all afore. It's all happened afore." Welty situates her narrative at a day of transition - a wedding, after which Dabney Fairchild will leave her parents' home. Change: and yet, Dabney and her new husband Troy will still live in a house owned by the Fairchild family, only a short ride away. This seeming change is just another step in the process of perpetuating the close Fairchild family ties into another generation. The clan as a whole functions as its own character, and yet individuals walk their own paths within it - sometimes honoring the status quo, sometimes rebelling against it; sometimes craving the attention of the Fairchilds, and sometimes longing to escape. Even Dabney's marriage is conceived as a kind of rebellion - she is marrying "beneath her" as a gesture of independence, to the dismay of much of her family. But at the same time, many of her other family members have also married out of their class, including the favorite son, Uncle George, on whom everyone fawns. So Dabney is simultaneously challenging the family structure, and yet fitting in perfectly with it; moving away from it, and yet forming its next branch. Delta Wedding catches her at that exhilarating, headstrong moment of youth when her passionate resolutions have yet to be tested or compromised:

The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....



"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring, sprung all over with red-gold hairs.

Like Virginia Woolf (of whom Welty strongly reminds me), Welty astounds with her ability to communicate the unexpected yet crucial importance of certain crystallized moments in time - the tiny catalysts that prompt a blaze of emotion or insight out of all proportion to the initial tiny spark - and the deep, quiet pools of reflection that unfurl within her characters at the oddest moments - while picking up a piece of cake at a rehearsal dinner, or waiting for the photographer to get everyone posed in a line.

"Not for me, not for me," she murmured, stunned at the sight of George at that moment offering the loaded [cake:] plate to her. It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easy - too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelley's eyes...

One of the things I most treasure about both Woolf and Welty is the subtle and perceptive ways they both portray human communication. A lot of modern, and modernist, writing focuses on the ways in which our standard modes of communication fall short: a husband and wife are unable to say "I love you"; a supposed mourner feels nothing at his mother's funeral; two lovers make wildly erroneous assumptions about one another's feelings; a gulf grows between a father and mother because they cannot discuss their dead baby. Welty and Woolf explore these truths as well, but they also portray the flip side: the fact that, just as communication often fails when we try for it directly, so too it often succeeds in unexpected and unlooked-for ways: the glance of empathy that connects two sisters across a room full of family; the way the minds of two old friends can flow easily in and out of each others' thoughts; the unexpected welcome of an errant daughter-in-law by a family expected to reject or punish her; a favorite uncle's genuine compassion when his niece steals his pipe in order to give it back to him as a present; the self-sacrifice of two maiden aunts, giving their most precious possession to a headstrong young bride. Welty seems to argue, here, that although we can none of us predict or wholly understand ourselves or others, and although our attempts at connection will seldom work as we intend, there are still moments of true, loving communion available to us in the world, and they will come to us unexpectedly, as gifts.

It seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling ... In the midst of the room's commotion he stood by the mantel as if at rest.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember the last family reunion I attended, maybe about 1961 or 1962. This was my mother’s family, the half of my family with Southern US roots, although removed from Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri for about 50 years. It was not the family of my father’s starched New England, Ohio and Illinois half.

I was 11 or 12 at the time. This particular reunion was held in summer in a park with all the family adults bringing Coca Cola, beer, fried chicken, potato salad, cookies and other tasty treats; plus passels of kids from ages newborn through just marrieds, games to play, gossip, untold secrets, hopes, disappointments and probably scandals, but I was too young to comprehend some of these. It was an innocent time.

I was absorbed by taking in all this family, conversation, the activity of my cousins and the experience in general. I had a Kodak Brownie Starlight camera, and some of those pictures survive, though taken with questionable photographic skill. They depict a time and place with many people who have since passed on, including my own mother and father (actually step father, but that is another story to tell).

Delta Wedding evoked this experience for me. It was a great trip down a nostalgia rabbit hole. The story revolves around the marriage of Dabney Fairchild. While my family reunions were not weddings, the gatherings had all the same range of characters, as so elegantly described by Welty, although of course particularly and singularly different in their unique selves.

This evocation of family in a memorable time is what impressed me so much with this book. It evoked died blond hair and lipsticked women, men with big voices and tanned arms, quiet young mothers, teens not sure where they belonged, and children with scabby knees and beestings.

I listened to the audiobook mostly in my car while driving. In the beginning, I found it difficult to follow all the characters, and there are a lot of them! I was wishing that I had the physical book and could take notes. I am still not entirely sure about all the family connections, but in the end, they were all clearly drawn, distinct, and it didn’t really matter. In any case, they were all either Fairchilds, or married to them, or descended from them.

Although the Fairchild gathering for the wedding takes place in a very specific place (not my Sacramento valley park), I think that for those who have had a myriad number of cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents and grand aunts and uncles gathered in one place, this will be a familiar story. Familiar as in family. For me, that trip down memory lane made me both happy and sad at the same time.

4.5 stars.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Delta Wedding about 20 years ago. Back then I thought it was boring and was frustrated because nothing happened. Ah, the folly of youth.

The second time around I became obsessed with Delta Wedding.  I raced home from work to pour a cold drink and sit on my porch in the shade in evening air that was still heavy and thick with humidity. The weather and lyrical writing transported me to the Delta to spend time in the chaotic home of the Fairchild's. 

Other than a wedding, nothing momentous happens in the week this book takes place, like nothing momentous happens at your family's Thanksgiving dinner.  Delta Wedding explores the family tensions and myths that continually create an ongoing history. This is a family where all the adult men but two have died in momentous events, where the women own the land but let the patriarchs run it, where a Scarlett O'Hara imitation is literally breaking the relics of the older generation to run to her future, and cotton is still picked by hand. Written in 1945, Welty is looking back at the unmomentous year of 1923. This is a quiet time in an insular world before the upheavals of a massive flood, the Depression, World War II and the exodus of cheap white and black labor to the war factories up north. Did the Fairchilds survive? Did the young boys in this book die in the Pacific and France? The answers to both questions are as unknown to us now as they were to the family when this wedding takes place.

(Spoilers below)
I was fascinated by Uncle George who inherits his elevated and beloved place in family lore after the death of his sainted brother Denis, the previous most adored brother/nephew/uncle/husband.  While all the Fairchild women tell us how different, sweet and wonderful he his, a close examination of his actions shows us a not a hero but a cur. This is a man who admits to having sex (rape?) just off the road with the ghostly lost girl that asks for directions to Memphis and a man who is indifferent to his wife and her emotional and physical needs. Though a new family legend is created about his heroic attempt to save Maureen from the Yellow Dog, it is the simple-minded girl that saves them both. Was this a "suicide by accident" attempt by George? It is the lost girl searching for Memphis that is killed by the train. I'm also curious about the hints Welty drops about George's sexuality. This was a very closeted time, particularly in the Bible Belt. She did base the Fairchild's on the family of a beloved friend who was closeted for most of his life.

While aging can be challenging, I am glad it has brought me the patience and life experiences to enjoy and appreciate the subtleties of Edora Welty and her wonderful descriptions that transport the ordinary to the sublime.  

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eudora Welty is supposed to be one of 20th Century America's great defining authors, but honestly, I just couldn't stick with this book. Although the writing was beautiful, after two chapters, nothing of consequence had taken place. The jacket referred to "drama upon drama, revelation upon revelation", but I read nothing that made me think this was going to happen.

Furthermore, the highly rated reviews from other readers mostly referred to their experiences as children. I know enough about growing up as a child in a southern family that I don't need a blow by blow description of summer in the south; I would prefer a book with a plot. Again, although the descriptions were almost perfectly reminiscent of summer in a sleepy southern locale, this book just wasn't for me.

[vecchiaphoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

libro bucolico e corale, pieno di bambini e vecchie zie, e di paesaggi vividi che diventano quasi personaggi (il bayou!). mi ha ricordato un po' la saga dei Cazalet (che ho amato), ma in versione "Stati Uniti del Sud".

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robbie sank into her chair and leaned, with her little square nails white on her small brown fingers, against the side of the table. "My sister Rebel is right. You're either born spoiled in the world or you're born not spoiled. And people keep you that way until you die. The people you love keep you the way you are."


~~The Yazoo Delta region of Mississippi

Eudora Welty's classic novel, originally written in 1945, tells the story of a quintessential Mississippi Delta family in the 1920's. There are more Aunt's then the reader can possibly keep track of, golden boys who can do no wrong, spoiled Southern Belles, and a little 9 year old girl who just lost her mother. There's also racism swimming just below the smooth talk of the white plantation dwellers which can be tough to stomach at times.

As for plot, Dabney, age 17, is about to marry Troy--the plantation overseer. He's red-haired, methodical, and clearly below her station. She doesn't care though, and so the wedding must be planned. Almost every female of the extended Fairchild clan has flocked to help plan the festivities. And so the drama and chaos of large family gatherings ensues.

Bottom line: While Welty writes well, almost poetically, the story dragged for me. I appreciate the window into time and place, but I didn't identify with any of the characters, and there were so *many* of them that I didn't feel that I got to know any of them well. In the end the main character for me is the Delta itself--and what a tough mistress she was to so many. Given 3 stars or a rating of "Good". Recommended to those who want to know more about early 20th century life in Mississippi.

Another favorite quote: "She had once seen Uncle George, without saying a word, clench his fist in the dining room at home--the sweetest man in the Delta. It is because people are mostly layers of violence and tenderness--wrapped like bulbs, she thought soberly; I don't know what makes them onions or hyacinths."

Stuff I learned: A look at Mississippi Delta life

[Lucinda Mcintyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love to read Eudora Welty in the summer when the cicada bugs are buzzing away and the heat is nearly enough to make you crazy!
A big, loud Southern family gathers for a wedding in 1920's Mississippi. Not much else really happens - but don't let that stop you from reading.
I started reading this book by trying to carefully figure out every paragraph - keeping straight who was who - and who was talking and to whom - and was really struggling. I finally realized that I needed to just let my eyes run over the words and let the cacophony of the dialogue and the comings and goings just fall on me the way they would if I had been there. Coming from a large, loud family myself - it was like being back in our living room when everyone was home - and everyone had their own agenda and ideas and everyone was talking to everyone and no one was really listening. It was like going home for me. I loved it.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at 50 pages. There are too many characters and the book is pointless. I wasted enough time trying to struggle making this worth my while.

[w gall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most women love weddings. Or so it seems to me. A dizzying array of characters connected to one family prepare for the wedding, and slowly disperse soon after the wedding. I believe that the modern literary device "stream of consciousness" is being used here, though with a lot of attending reflections. The development of relationships is a central focus. Did I enjoy it? It maintained my interest; I could follow it. But it's really not my cup of tea. I initially gave it 3 stars, but upon reflection, the fact that many others would enjoy the theme of this book, and the consummate literary skill that Eudora Welty displays in this novel, I'm upping my rating to 4. If books about weddings interest you, I highly recommend it to you. It's not an easy read though; you'll have to apply yourself to following the narrative.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite often when I read novels by the very best authors, I find myself living inside the book. That is, I feel as if I am a part of the setting, always as an observer—the quintessential fly on the wall—but nonetheless inside the novel's prism. When I entered the setting of this classic novel by Eudora Welty, I was immersed in chaos, experiencing virtual whiplash.

It's September 1923 in the Mississippi Delta. It's still hot. The air is languid, the mosquitoes are biting, and the silent bayou is teeming with life. The Fairchild family is preparing for their daughter Dabney's wedding. She's 17 (and not the eldest daughter, which has some eyebrows raised) and is marrying "beneath her," having fallen in love with the cotton plantation's overseer, Troy Flavin. Her father, Battle, isn't happy about the pending nuptials but is resigned to them. Her mother, Ellen, is pregnant with her ninth child as she manages the ceremony and reception that will take place in their home on their plantation, which is named Shellmound.

The story begins when nine-year-old Laura McRaven, the daughter of Battle's sister, Annie Laurie, who died the previous January, travels from Jackson by train to Fairchilds (yes, the town is named after the family) for the wedding. But sadly, they tell her she can't be a flower girl because her mother died. Some of the story is seen through Laura's incredulous eyes. She's an only child, who has been dropped into the middle of all this mayhem where everyone knows that when the hall clock strikes two it is really eight.

There is no plot. This is a novel about people, focusing on the many (many!) characters' thoughts, actions, and (sometimes weird) introspections. Chaos, confusion, and conflict reign throughout the house—there is just so much noise!—and the surrounding area with so many people, including what seems like dozens of Black servants and field hands. This is a home where the men think they are in charge, but the women are the real rulers.

What is amazing is that Eudora Welty always has control of the story and the characters even though every page is filled with bedlam and pandemonium as she tells this exemplary Southern tale of a boisterous, rowdy family living in a far simpler time.