As Suzan Harrison has noted in her study of the impact of Virginia Woolf’s fiction on that of Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, Welty “entered into a dialogue with Woolf upon first reading To the Lighthouse” in 1930. Indeed, Harrison claims that “Welty made this dialogue central to her first attempt at writing” her own novel years later, and the result was her 1946 classic, Delta Wedding. A portrait of the Fairchild family as they prepare for their daughter Dabney’s marriage in the Mississippi Delta of 1923, Welty’s narrative is a compelling exploration of the complex dynamics of race, class, and gender that existed in the South at this time, as well as an homage to the storytelling of her British counterpart, whose groundbreaking 1927 novel “forever opened the door of imaginative fiction” for Welty. Welty’s admiration for Woolf’s genius would become a lifelong one, but her own genius is on full display in Delta Wedding, a novel which mirrors Woolf’s in its form and focus but which reflects Welty’s deep knowledge of the changing cultural norms of the South at this time.

The required text: Welty, Eudora. Delta Wedding. 1946. New York: Harcourt, Inc. ISBN 978-0156252805 is available online and in the Calvin University campus store.

Subject: literature

Christina Triezenberg holds a Ph.D. in English from Western Michigan University and has taught at Grand Valley State University, Morningside College, and Michigan State University. She is currently compiling an anthology of contemporary Detroit poetry, as well as revising a full-length study of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller, Gone with the Wind, tentatively titled Reading toward Scarlett: Tracing the Texts that Helped to Shape Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.