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Old Mortality
Katherine Anne Porter's short novel Old Mortality might be a tale of teenage rebellion except that the rebellious acts are all committed by an aunt long dead. The story, centered around the impressionable Maria and Miranda, daughters of a puritanical Southern patriarch, describes how one of them breaks free from a life of remembered greatness to realize her own potential.
- GenresShort StoriesClassics
51 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1988
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About the author
Katherine Anne Porter
154 books350 followersKatherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherin...
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 2, 2025
Old Mortality by Katherine Anne Porter
Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
This is an unexpectedly long short story.
In fact, approaching it with an inappropriate mindset I had trouble following and concentrating on the plot and characters.
I was expecting the usual twenty, maybe even forty pages.
It is much longer...what? Two hundred e-reader pages?
And the narrative seemed somewhat convoluted.
There is a dead aunt Amy that, together with some other relatives from the past is compared with some of those living.
As is often the case, the good old days and the honorable ancestors were much better than the present.
Even when some of those heroes and heroines are not exactly text book examples of good behavior.
This aunt for instance, got herself engaged and then separated from a suitor called Gabriel.
Our feelings can change, but why encourage someone you don't like.
At least that's my perspective, given the incomplete attention that I paid to this account.
We have some serious themes and issues, touched upon in passing or contemplated in more detail.
Feminism is one.
In the days of this tale, women did not have the right to vote.
So it is admirable for a woman to not just stand for those ideals, but go to prison for them...
Three times.
Throughout the account the reader learns about racing horses and the bets placed on some of them by the protagonists.
There is also a jocular reference to some good equines.
A relative has gained a lot of weight and her husband wouldn't let her ride on his good horses...
He is admonished:
- But don't you think about her pride and feelings?
- I care more about my poor horses' health
- Really?
- Besides, if she had pride, she would not reach this pyramidal shape.
Words to that effect
Then we have the humorous, for this reader, reference to the need to learn Latin.
And what argument is used?
Well, the quote given by Lincoln's assassin
- Syc semper tyrannis
In other words, it is good to have a quote handy under any circumstances.
Even if we are Southerners, what John Booth did, killing the president is not good...
At least they add a rejection of the
Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
This is an unexpectedly long short story.
In fact, approaching it with an inappropriate mindset I had trouble following and concentrating on the plot and characters.
I was expecting the usual twenty, maybe even forty pages.
It is much longer...what? Two hundred e-reader pages?
And the narrative seemed somewhat convoluted.
There is a dead aunt Amy that, together with some other relatives from the past is compared with some of those living.
As is often the case, the good old days and the honorable ancestors were much better than the present.
Even when some of those heroes and heroines are not exactly text book examples of good behavior.
This aunt for instance, got herself engaged and then separated from a suitor called Gabriel.
Our feelings can change, but why encourage someone you don't like.
At least that's my perspective, given the incomplete attention that I paid to this account.
We have some serious themes and issues, touched upon in passing or contemplated in more detail.
Feminism is one.
In the days of this tale, women did not have the right to vote.
So it is admirable for a woman to not just stand for those ideals, but go to prison for them...
Three times.
Throughout the account the reader learns about racing horses and the bets placed on some of them by the protagonists.
There is also a jocular reference to some good equines.
A relative has gained a lot of weight and her husband wouldn't let her ride on his good horses...
He is admonished:
- But don't you think about her pride and feelings?
- I care more about my poor horses' health
- Really?
- Besides, if she had pride, she would not reach this pyramidal shape.
Words to that effect
Then we have the humorous, for this reader, reference to the need to learn Latin.
And what argument is used?
Well, the quote given by Lincoln's assassin
- Syc semper tyrannis
In other words, it is good to have a quote handy under any circumstances.
Even if we are Southerners, what John Booth did, killing the president is not good...
At least they add a rejection of the
December 4, 2018
4.7 stars
While it can be long-winded and convoluted at times, this is an engaging short story with some interesting themes. I like the general family dynamic and the way the story explores the generation gap between the adults and the girls. The adults' preoccupation with the past and how it affects the girls' present was displayed brilliantly. I can't put my finger on exactly why I liked the story so much, but I did.
While it can be long-winded and convoluted at times, this is an engaging short story with some interesting themes. I like the general family dynamic and the way the story explores the generation gap between the adults and the girls. The adults' preoccupation with the past and how it affects the girls' present was displayed brilliantly. I can't put my finger on exactly why I liked the story so much, but I did.
December 2, 2019
When I picked up this book, I had no reference for Katherine Anne Porter, nor the story of Old Mortality. But I was pleasantly surprised by this read. Especially with the last few pages that are built up to down an intricately paved road of back story. This book truly spoke to me on a level I wasn't expecting. The parting thoughts that the protagonist Miranda comes to, felt very familiar and somewhat cathartic to hear expressed.
March 22, 2022
At the Dawn of the twentieth century, two young girls, Maria and Miranda, have trouble deciphering the lives and stories of older family members … particularly intriguing to them is a photograph of their Aunt Amy, who died before they were born … slowly, the girls begin to understand their family’s history …
October 23, 2023
I read this in a group led by Monica Miller, author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion. Insight from the group setting pushed this up to ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐..
KAP is pretty brilliant in this novella at illustrating the impact of past family history on the present generation receiving it. Importantly, it is shown that the history being told isn't always factual. The other major theme is feminine beauty, and all the physical features and mannerisms a woman must posses to be crowned a beauty.
Main characters:
🟢Maria (age12 in part1) and her sister Miranda (age 8 in part1).
🟢Aunt Amy (late teens, early 20s) It is not a spoiler to note that Aunt Amy is dead. The question of her personality, how she died, and how her death effects the family, are what drive the narrative. The narrator seems to change between omniscient, Maria, and Miranda. Here is an example from the omniscient perspective, where the girls are looking at the framed photo of their deceased aunt.
She was a spirited looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth....
She sat thus, forever in the pose of being photographed, a motionless image in her dark walnut frame with silver oak leaves in the corners, her smiling gray eyes following one about the room. It was a reckless indifferent smile, rather disturbing to her nieces Maria and Miranda.
There are three parts to this novella, and this is taken right from the first page of Part 1: 1885 - 1902. KAP really steeps the reader in the two themes of family history and feminine beauty. I love this point about how much of our adolescent lives are dominated by the memories adults give to us. Those memories shape so much of ours minds and actions!
Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of grownups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe.
It was shocking to read the description of what beauty is, but it makes sense for a novella published in 1939. Maria and Miranda learn of beauty primarily from their father, but the concept seems to be constantly spoken about by all the family members. There is a rather humorous little section of the story where we learn that great-uncle John Jacob refused to let his wife great-aunt Keziah "ride his good horses after she had achieved two hundred and twenty pounds." This comes up when Maria and Miranda are wondering about the truth of family history. Their father Harry, Aunt Amy's brother, tells his girls that "There were never any fat women in the family, thank God." But there were! The sisters conclude:
But something seemed to happen to their father's memory when he thought of the girls he had known in the family of his youth, and he declared steadfastly they had all been, in every generation without exception, as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs.
As Old Mortality progresses through Part 2: 1904 and Part 3: 1912, Katherine Anne Porter gives much of the narration over to Miranda. She is like Aunt Amy in that their behavior doesn't fit traditional expectation of the well-behaved feminine. For instance, Miranda dreams at one point of being the first female jockey. When she is frustrated in class she "[gave] way to despair over her arithmetic and had fallen flat on her face on the classroom floor, refusing to rise until she was carried out."
I can't comment on Aunt Amy's love interest without spoilers. His name is Gabriel, and he is Harry and Amy's second cousin (again, okay for 1939). There is also Cousin Eva, who is the anti-thesis of feminine beauty.
I'll close this review with a paragraph emphasized by Monica in today's class:
It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them.
🧡📚
Class: The Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter with Monica Miller, Case Western Reserve University
KAP is pretty brilliant in this novella at illustrating the impact of past family history on the present generation receiving it. Importantly, it is shown that the history being told isn't always factual. The other major theme is feminine beauty, and all the physical features and mannerisms a woman must posses to be crowned a beauty.
Main characters:
🟢Maria (age12 in part1) and her sister Miranda (age 8 in part1).
🟢Aunt Amy (late teens, early 20s) It is not a spoiler to note that Aunt Amy is dead. The question of her personality, how she died, and how her death effects the family, are what drive the narrative. The narrator seems to change between omniscient, Maria, and Miranda. Here is an example from the omniscient perspective, where the girls are looking at the framed photo of their deceased aunt.
She was a spirited looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth....
She sat thus, forever in the pose of being photographed, a motionless image in her dark walnut frame with silver oak leaves in the corners, her smiling gray eyes following one about the room. It was a reckless indifferent smile, rather disturbing to her nieces Maria and Miranda.
There are three parts to this novella, and this is taken right from the first page of Part 1: 1885 - 1902. KAP really steeps the reader in the two themes of family history and feminine beauty. I love this point about how much of our adolescent lives are dominated by the memories adults give to us. Those memories shape so much of ours minds and actions!
Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of grownups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe.
It was shocking to read the description of what beauty is, but it makes sense for a novella published in 1939. Maria and Miranda learn of beauty primarily from their father, but the concept seems to be constantly spoken about by all the family members. There is a rather humorous little section of the story where we learn that great-uncle John Jacob refused to let his wife great-aunt Keziah "ride his good horses after she had achieved two hundred and twenty pounds." This comes up when Maria and Miranda are wondering about the truth of family history. Their father Harry, Aunt Amy's brother, tells his girls that "There were never any fat women in the family, thank God." But there were! The sisters conclude:
But something seemed to happen to their father's memory when he thought of the girls he had known in the family of his youth, and he declared steadfastly they had all been, in every generation without exception, as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs.
As Old Mortality progresses through Part 2: 1904 and Part 3: 1912, Katherine Anne Porter gives much of the narration over to Miranda. She is like Aunt Amy in that their behavior doesn't fit traditional expectation of the well-behaved feminine. For instance, Miranda dreams at one point of being the first female jockey. When she is frustrated in class she "[gave] way to despair over her arithmetic and had fallen flat on her face on the classroom floor, refusing to rise until she was carried out."
I can't comment on Aunt Amy's love interest without spoilers. His name is Gabriel, and he is Harry and Amy's second cousin (again, okay for 1939). There is also Cousin Eva, who is the anti-thesis of feminine beauty.
I'll close this review with a paragraph emphasized by Monica in today's class:
It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them.
🧡📚
Class: The Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter with Monica Miller, Case Western Reserve University
June 2, 2020
Like all of Katherine Anne Porter's fiction, Old Mortality leaves me somewhat puzzled. When I enter a Porter short story or novella, I immediately feel a fog or mist descend. It's an indicator of the kind of fog or mist that envelops the past, as well as the foggy or misty mind of the protagonist. Everything is in a muddle. I wait for the clearing, but generally I don't find it.
In Old Morality, Porter centers Miranda in this fog. We first meet Miranda as an 8-year-old, listening to stories of the past, hearing a romantic version of the life of her Aunt Amy, a beautiful heartbreaker who died young of tuberculosis (such a romantic disease!). Miranda (and her sister Maria) enjoy their vision of Aunt Amy, a picture of who they think she was. Of course, as children, they are missing a number of the facts, partly because the facts surrounding Amy have been purposely obscured by her family.
We next meet Miranda when she's older, 12, bordering on adolescence. Now Maria and Miranda are off at a convent school, and their father comes to visit and take them to the racetrack. The girls meet Uncle Gabriel, Amy's husband. He's remarried, and in no way is he the romantic lover the girls have heard about. He's a dissipated gambler with a drinking problem who alternates between a lifestyle of glamour when he's flush and poverty when he's broke. For Miranda, this is the first hint that the stories she's heard from her family aren't exactly true.
Finally, we see Miranda at 18. She's dropped out of school and eloped with a man her family doesn't approve of. As she shares a train car with an old cousin, her romantic notions of Aunt Amy are further shattered, even though she can now more easily identify with her. The novella ends with the word "ignorance," fitting because even though 18-year-old Miranda has a clearer vision of not only her Aunt Amy but also her entire family, she cannot see how her own life mirrors that of her aunt. The picture is clearer, but it's still fuzzy.
Where will Miranda be in another 10 years? Porter doesn't give us that. Instead, we're left to imagine the unhappy reality Miranda must confront.
Old Mortality reminds me of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Both use New Orleans as a major setting, and both deal with the theme of the past versus the present, with female characters who make questionable choices.
In Old Morality, Porter centers Miranda in this fog. We first meet Miranda as an 8-year-old, listening to stories of the past, hearing a romantic version of the life of her Aunt Amy, a beautiful heartbreaker who died young of tuberculosis (such a romantic disease!). Miranda (and her sister Maria) enjoy their vision of Aunt Amy, a picture of who they think she was. Of course, as children, they are missing a number of the facts, partly because the facts surrounding Amy have been purposely obscured by her family.
We next meet Miranda when she's older, 12, bordering on adolescence. Now Maria and Miranda are off at a convent school, and their father comes to visit and take them to the racetrack. The girls meet Uncle Gabriel, Amy's husband. He's remarried, and in no way is he the romantic lover the girls have heard about. He's a dissipated gambler with a drinking problem who alternates between a lifestyle of glamour when he's flush and poverty when he's broke. For Miranda, this is the first hint that the stories she's heard from her family aren't exactly true.
Finally, we see Miranda at 18. She's dropped out of school and eloped with a man her family doesn't approve of. As she shares a train car with an old cousin, her romantic notions of Aunt Amy are further shattered, even though she can now more easily identify with her. The novella ends with the word "ignorance," fitting because even though 18-year-old Miranda has a clearer vision of not only her Aunt Amy but also her entire family, she cannot see how her own life mirrors that of her aunt. The picture is clearer, but it's still fuzzy.
Where will Miranda be in another 10 years? Porter doesn't give us that. Instead, we're left to imagine the unhappy reality Miranda must confront.
Old Mortality reminds me of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Both use New Orleans as a major setting, and both deal with the theme of the past versus the present, with female characters who make questionable choices.
October 24, 2024
One of several short works by Katherine Anne Porter. This one is about a family and the influence of past relatives even after they have died. It is set in the south. One of the themes she writes about is about family history, childhood, women’s place in society,
December 14, 2022
Picked it up at a little Library in New Paltz. Includes two other short novels. Interesting and enjoyable.
February 26, 2024
this story is SO GOOD. would recommend (only like 50 pages)
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March 24, 2024i fell asleep 3 times reading this for my class
July 23, 2025
tremenda catarsi de cop amb aquest final
December 10, 2025
This novella captures what it was like growing up in east Texas in the early 1900's. Katherine Anne Porter's writing style is unique and beautiful to read. Plus my wife was names after her!
January 4, 2026
a sad story that is probably true many times over
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews